In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

Humans are remarkably sensitive to the statistical structure of language. However, different mechanisms have been proposed to account for such statistical sensitivities. The present study compared adult learning of syntax and the ability of two models of statistical learning to simulate human performance: Simple Recurrent Networks, which learn by…

Statistical learning may be central to lexical and grammatical development. The phonological and distributional properties of words provide probabilistic cues to their grammatical and semantic properties. Infants can capitalize on such probabilistic cues to learn grammatical patterns in listening tasks. However, infants often struggle to learn…

This study examined how individual differences in cognitive abilities account for variance in the attainment level of adult second language (L2) syntactic development. Participants completed assessments of declarative and procedural learning abilities. They subsequently learned an artificial L2 under implicit training conditions and received…

Natural languages contain many layers of sequential structure, from the distribution of phonemes within words to the distribution of phrases within utterances. However, most research modeling language acquisition using artificial languages has focused on only one type of distributional structure at a time. In two experiments, we investigated adult…

In the popular mind, constructing a language has always been seen as an odd activity, one that seems to fly in the face of "natural" language dynamics. It is, nonetheless, a very old activity, and attention to its various stages is an important part of the study of linguistic history--and, indeed, of modern scientific development. The…

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of…

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical…

Purpose: Children learning language conceptualize the nature of input they receive in ways that allow them to understand and construct utterances they have never heard before. This study was designed to illuminate the types of information children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) focus on to develop their conceptualizations and…

This study compared the effectiveness of balanced and skewed input at facilitating the acquisition of the transitive construction in Esperanto, characterized by the accusative suffix "-n" and variable word order (SVO, OVS). Thai university students (N = 98) listened to 24 sentences under skewed (one noun with high token frequency) or…

Typologists have long observed that there are certain distributional patterns that are not evenly distributed among the world's languages. This discussion note revisits a recent experimental investigation of one such intriguing case, so-called "universal 18", by Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre (2012). The authors find that adult learners are…

Word frequencies in natural language follow a highly skewed Zipfian distribution, but the consequences of this distribution for language acquisition are only beginning to be understood. Typically, learning experiments that are meant to simulate language acquisition use uniform word frequency distributions. We examine the effects of Zipfian…

The laterality difference in the occipitotemporal region between Chinese (bilaterality) and alphabetic languages (left laterality) has been attributed to their difference in visual appearance. However, these languages also differ in orthographic transparency. To disentangle the effect of orthographic transparency from visual appearance, we trained…

High opportunities to respond (OTR) have been touted as being a key factor in a popular and effective drill procedure called incremental rehearsal (IR). However, IR has also been criticized because it takes more instructional time than other drill procedures and can be less time efficient. The current study compared the effectiveness and…

This dissertation presents results from a series of experiments investigating adult learning of an artificial language and the effects that input frequency (high vs. low token frequency), frequency distribution (skewed vs. balanced), presentation mode (structured vs. scrambled), and first language (English vs. Japanese) have on such learning.…