Children and Adults as Language Learners: Rules, Variation, and Maturational Change
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Here we overview our recent research investigating children and adults' learning of rules and variation. In all these studies, our findings are that children and adults differ in how they acquire linguistic patterns that are productive, variable, inconsistently used, or lexically restricted. Some of our studies examine children's learning of natural languages; other studies expose learners to miniature languages and then ask them to produce novel sentences or judge their grammaticality. In every case there are important differences between learners as a function of their ages. Young children learn categorical rules and categorically follow patterns that are widespread in natural languages, even when their linguistic input exemplifies these patterns only probabilistically. In contrast, adult learners reproduce the probabilistic patterns of the input. Older children are in between, producing regular patterns somewhat more often than they appear in the input but also acquiring some probabilistic variation. These results suggest that the outcome of learning is quite different at different ages and that many of the properties of natural languages may be shaped by the behavior of children as they learn their native languages.
Source: Topics in Cognitive Science
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12416
Author: Elissa L. Newport
Institution: Georgetown University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
Awards: District of Columbia Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, Language development and linguistic processing after left hemisphere perinatal stroke, Structure and Acquisition of Signed and Spoken Languages, Statistical approaches to linguistic pattern learning, District of Columbia Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (DC-IDDRC)
OpenAlex ID: W2919075176