Regular Article
Constraints on Statistical Language Learning

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Abstract

How do learners discover the structure in linguistic input? One set of cues which learners might use to acquire phrase structure are the dependencies, or predictive relationships, which link elements within phrases. In order to determine whether learners can use this statistical information, adults and children were exposed to artificial languages that either contained or violated the kinds of dependencies that characterize natural languages. Additional experiments contrasted the acquisition of these linguistic systems with the same grammars implemented as non-linguistic input (sequences of nonlinguistic sounds or shapes). Predictive relationships yielded better learning for sequentially presented auditory stimuli, and for simultaneously presented visual stimuli, but no such advantage was found for sequentially presented visual stimuli. Learning outcomes were not affected by the degree to which the input contained linguistic content. These findings suggest that constraints on learning mechanisms that mirror the structure of natural languages are not tailored solely for language learning. Implications for theories of language acquisition and perceptual learning are discussed.

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    Experiment 1 was submitted to the University of Rochester as a portion of the author's dissertation and was supported by NIH Training Grant 5T32DC0003 to the University of Rochester and by NIH Grant DC00167 to Elissa Newport. Experiments 2–6 and the preparation of the manuscript were supported by grants to the author from NIH (HD03352 and HD37466), NSF (BCS-9983630), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School. I am grateful to Maria Boardman, Toby Calandra, Carrie Franz, Elizabeth Johnson, and Lana Nenide and the members of the UW-Madison Learning Languages Lab for their assistance in conducting these experiments, to three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on a previous draft, and to Martha Alibali, Dick Aslin, Art Glenberg, Michael Kaschak, Lana Nenida, Erik Thissen, and especially Elissa Newport for helpful discussions.

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    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Jenny R. Saffran at the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: [email protected].

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