Kindergarteners Use Cross-Situational Statistics to Infer the Meaning of Grammatical Elements.

Sybren Spit, Sible Andringa, Judith Rispens, Enoch O Aboh

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Article in Journal of psycholinguistic research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

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1citing papers in PubMed

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1 citing paper in PubMed.

Implicit Grammatical Gender Representation in Italian Children with Autism without Intellectual/Language Disorder.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023
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Authors and funding

4 authors.

Sybren SpitAmsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. S.B.Spit@uva.nl.

Sible AndringaAmsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Judith RispensAmsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Enoch O AbohAmsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Yet, it is unclear to what extent statistical learning is involved in more naturalistic settings, when young children have to acquire meaningful grammatical elements. In the present study, we address these points, by investigating whether statistical learning is involved in acquiring a morpho-syntactic structure from input that resembles natural languages more closely. We exposed 50 kindergarteners (M = 5 years, 5 months) to a miniature language in which they had to learn a grammatical marker that expressed number, and which could only be acquired on the basis of the distributional properties in the input. Half of the children performed an attention check during the experiment. Results show that young children are able to learn this meaning. We found no clear evidence that facilitating attention to the input increases learning performance.

Indexed as

LanguageLanguage DevelopmentChildChild, PreschoolHumansLearningLinguisticsFunctional elementsLanguage acquisitionMiniature languageStatistical learning

Identifiers

PMID35794402

DOI10.1007/s10936-022-09898-0

PMCPMC9646556

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