Fazekas Judit, Jessop Andrew, Pine Julian, Rowland Caroline
Language Development Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Gelderland, The Netherlands.
Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool Institute of Psychology Health and Society, Liverpool, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Nov 4;7(11):180877. doi: 10.1098/rsos.180877. eCollection 2020 Nov.
Error-based theories of language acquisition suggest that children, like adults, continuously make and evaluate predictions in order to reach an adult-like state of language use. However, while these theories have become extremely influential, their central claim-that unpredictable input leads to higher rates of lasting change in linguistic representations-has scarcely been tested. We designed a prime surprisal-based intervention study to assess this claim. As predicted, both 5- to 6-year-old children ( = 72) and adults ( = 72) showed a pre- to post-test shift towards producing the dative syntactic structure they were exposed to in surprising sentences. The effect was significant in both age groups together, and in the child group separately when participants with ceiling performance in the pre-test were excluded. Secondary predictions were not upheld: we found no verb-based learning effects and there was only reliable evidence for immediate prime surprisal effects in the adult, but not in the child group. To our knowledge, this is the first published study demonstrating enhanced learning rates for the same syntactic structure when it appeared in surprising as opposed to predictable contexts, thus providing crucial support for error-based theories of language acquisition.
基于错误的语言习得理论认为，儿童与成年人一样，会持续做出并评估预测，以达到类似成人的语言使用状态。然而，尽管这些理论极具影响力，但其核心主张——不可预测的输入会导致语言表征中更高的持久变化率——几乎未得到验证。我们设计了一项基于启动意外性的干预研究来评估这一主张。正如预期的那样，5至6岁儿童（n = 72）和成年人（n = 72）在测试前到测试后都表现出向产出他们在意外句子中接触到的与格句法结构转变。该效应在两个年龄组合并时显著，在排除测试前表现达到上限的参与者后，在儿童组中单独也显著。次要预测未得到支持：我们未发现基于动词的学习效应，并且只有可靠证据表明在成年人中存在即时启动意外性效应，而在儿童组中没有。据我们所知，这是第一项发表的研究，表明当相同句法结构出现在意外而非可预测的语境中时，学习率会提高，从而为基于错误的语言习得理论提供了关键支持。
