Pauses matter: Rule-learning in children

Language learners have to both segment words and discover grammatical rules connecting those words in sentences. In adult listeners, the presence of a prosodic cue in the speech stream, for example, a pause, appears to facilitate rule-learning of non-adjacent dependencies of the form AiXCi (Peña et al., 2002). Only when listening to the artificial language containing pauses, could participants identify rule-words of the form AiAjCi or AiCjCi, where intervening syllables were moved from A- or C-positions. Frost and Monaghan (2016) found in a similar study that participants who were tested with novel, rather than moved, intervening syllables in AiXCi items showed rule-learning even when the familiarisation stream contained no pauses. The present study re-examines the facilitative effect of pauses in discovering structural rules in speech in a novel population: children aged 7-11. We used the same artificial speech stimuli as Peña et al. (2002) and tested children in both a moved-syllable and novel-syllable forced-choice task. The results of 140 children show that pauses provide a facilitative effect on rule-learning – also for young learners. Regardless of syllable types, only children who listened to the familiarisation stream containing pauses chose words following the rule above chance-level

Two sides of the same coin? Comparing structural priming between production and comprehension in choice data and in reaction times

Abstract: Although structural priming seems to rely on the same mechanisms in production and comprehension, effects are not always consistent between modalities. Methodological differences often result in different data types, namely choice data in production and reaction time data in comprehension. In a structural priming experiment with English ditransitives, we collected choice data and reaction time data in both modalities. The choice data showed priming of the DO and PO dative. The reaction times revealed priming of the PO dative. In production, PO targets were chosen faster after a PO prime than after a baseline prime. In comprehension, DO targets were read slower after a PO prime than after a baseline prime. This result can be explained from competition between alternatives during structure selection. Priming leads to facilitation of the primed structure or inhibition of the opposite structure depending on the relative frequency of structures, which may differ across modalities

The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

Abstract: The developmental account of second language (L2) syntactic acquisition in late learners (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017) predicts that learners start with item-specific syntactic representations, which become abstract over time. We investigated how the transition between item-specific and abstract syntactic representations takes place for transitive structures in a within-Dutch structural priming experiment. In a longitudinal and a cross-sectional design, we tested whether and when late learners show priming for active and passive sentences, and whether the learning of the passive structure can be sped up by means of a lexically-based structural priming intervention. Active priming took place before passive priming, although abstract representations of the passive may be formed quite rapidly after exposure, which seemed to be accelerated by the intervention. Our results suggest that a developmental account of L2 syntactic acquisition should be a hybrid model, incorporating aspects of the residual activation account as well as an implicit learning mechanism