Learning Patterns in Spoken Input: Cues to Non-Adjacent Dependency-Learning in an
Artificial Grammar Paradigm
Artificial Grammars (AG) are employed to test subjects’ (adults and/or infants) ability to
detect patterns or regularities in speech they have never heard before, in order to identify
learning mechanisms that could potentially serve language acquisition. Yet AG studies
routinely employ highly simplified and artificial speech, controlled for possible confounding
cues but hardly similar to what a learner is exposed to when s/he is acquiring a natural
language. How, then, can we show that such learning is crucial to (natural) language
acquisition, or investigate what natural language cues may support the learning mechanism?
In this study I investigate non-adjacent dependency-learning (Gómez, 2002; Gómez & Maye,
2005), a learning mechanism which has been hypothesize to underlie young children’s ability
to pick up morpho-syntactic dependencies such as At the bakery,
everybody is baking bread(Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998). Using a simple AG with the
structure aXb, I show that adult participants are capable of picking up the dependency a_b
only when the dependent elements have perceptual properties that distinguish them from the
intervening X, and only when the prosody of the aXb strings is as similar to the prosody of
natural language phrases as possible. Furthermore, I hypothesize that natural languages, with
their prosodic properties and their ability to perceptually mark the distinction between
functional (is, -ing, elements that can engage in morpho-syntactic dependencies) and lexical
elements (elements surrounding morpho-syntactic dependencies, cf. Shi, Morgan &
Allopenna, 1998), are optimally designed for the detection of morpho-syntactic dependencies
through the type of pattern-learning mechanism evidenced in this study.
In the second part of the talk I address the importance of incremental learning, i.e. the fact
that infants become sensitive to functional elements that can engage in morpho-syntactic
dependencies earlier than they show behavioral sensitivity to the dependencies themselves; I
investigate whether exposing participants to the individual a and b elements in a
prefamiliarization phase enhances learning of a_b dependencies.
Works Cited
Gómez, R.L. (2002). Variability and the detection of invariable structure.Psychological
Science, 13 (5), 431-436.
Gómez, R. L., & Maye, J. (2005). The developmental trajectory of nonadjacent dependency
learning. Infancy, 7, 183-206.
Santelmann, L. M. & P.W. Jusczyk (1998). Sensitivity to discontinuous dependencies in
language learners: evidence for the limitations in processing space. Cognition, 69, 105-134.
Shi, R., J.L. Morgan & P. Allopenna (1998). Phonological and acoustic bases for earliest
grammatical category assignment: a cross-linguistic perspective. Journal of Child Language,
25, 169-201