| الوصف: |
Language learners must acquire multiple cues to meaning and structure within natural languages. Although in naturalistic situations these cues are experienced simultaneously, previous work suggests that some cues are prioritised over others, and that the salience and availability of specific cues can influence the learning of grammatical categories (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989; Culbertson et al., 2017). In the current experiment, we use an artificial language paradigm to control which cues learners are exposed to, and when: we will examine whether exposing participants to cues sequentially rather than simultaneously can enhance learning. Participants will be trained on a set of novel word-stems paired with affixes: a co-occurring prefix and suffix which are associated with the salient semantic category of animacy (e.g. tib Xeem words paired with pictures of animals; ked Xool words with artefacts). Participants will then be assessed on their learning of word forms and meanings, as well as the grammatical regularities in the language: the determiner and suffix mapping to semantics, and the co-occurrence of the determiner + suffix. In previous experiments using this paradigm we have found that learners prioritise a) semantics and b) the early-available cue (i.e. the determiner; Mirkovic et al, 2021; Vogliqi et al., unpublished). We have found robust evidence of learning of the determiner-semantics mapping, but poor learning of the suffix-semantics mapping, and particularly the determiner-suffix co-occurrence. We have also found that training participants without the determiner initially can enhance learning of the suffix. With the current study, we aim to replicate and extend this finding, to examine whether initially training word-forms with the suffix but without the determiner or semantics, and introducing these cues subsequently, can improve learning of the suffix and the determiner-suffix co-occurrence. |
