Wilson Benjamin, Spierings Michelle, Ravignani Andrea, Mueller Jutta L, Mintz Toben H, Wijnen Frank, van der Kant Anne, Smith Kenny, Rey Arnaud
Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University.
Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna.
Top Cogn Sci. 2020 Jul;12(3):843-858. doi: 10.1111/tops.12381. Epub 2018 Sep 8.
Learning and processing natural language requires the ability to track syntactic relationships between words and phrases in a sentence, which are often separated by intervening material. These nonadjacent dependencies can be studied using artificial grammar learning paradigms and structured sequence processing tasks. These approaches have been used to demonstrate that human adults, infants and some nonhuman animals are able to detect and learn dependencies between nonadjacent elements within a sequence. However, learning nonadjacent dependencies appears to be more cognitively demanding than detecting dependencies between adjacent elements, and only occurs in certain circumstances. In this review, we discuss different types of nonadjacent dependencies in language and in artificial grammar learning experiments, and how these differences might impact learning. We summarize different types of perceptual cues that facilitate learning, by highlighting the relationship between dependent elements bringing them closer together either physically, attentionally, or perceptually. Finally, we review artificial grammar learning experiments in human adults, infants, and nonhuman animals, and discuss how similarities and differences observed across these groups can provide insights into how language is learned across development and how these language-related abilities might have evolved.
学习和处理自然语言需要具备追踪句子中单词和短语之间句法关系的能力，而这些单词和短语往往被中间的内容隔开。可以使用人工语法学习范式和结构化序列处理任务来研究这些非相邻依存关系。这些方法已被用于证明，人类成年人、婴儿以及一些非人类动物能够检测并学习序列中非相邻元素之间的依存关系。然而，学习非相邻依存关系似乎比检测相邻元素之间的依存关系在认知上要求更高，并且只在某些情况下发生。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了语言和人工语法学习实验中不同类型的非相邻依存关系，以及这些差异可能如何影响学习。我们通过强调依存元素之间的关系，在物理上、注意力上或感知上使它们更紧密地联系在一起，总结了有助于学习的不同类型的感知线索。最后，我们回顾了人类成年人、婴儿和非人类动物的人工语法学习实验，并讨论了在这些群体中观察到的异同如何能够为跨发育过程中语言的学习方式以及这些与语言相关的能力可能如何进化提供见解。
