Article
Authors: Anika van der Klis (Utrecht University) , Rianne van Lieburg (University of Antwerp) , Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng (Leiden University) , Clara Cecilia Levelt (Leiden University)
Language learners have to both segment words and discover grammatical rules connecting those words in sentences. In adult listeners, the presence of a prosodic cue in the speech stream, for example, a pause, appears to facilitate rule-learning of non-adjacent dependencies of the form AiXCi (Peña et al., 2002). Only when listening to the artificial language containing pauses, could participants identify rule-words of the form AiAjCi or AiCjCi, where intervening syllables were moved from A- or C-positions. Frost and Monaghan (2016) found in a similar study that participants who were tested with novel, rather than moved, intervening syllables in AiXCi items showed rule-learning even when the familiarisation stream contained no pauses. The present study re-examines the facilitative effect of pauses in discovering structural rules in speech in a novel population: children aged 7-11. We used the same artificial speech stimuli as Peña et al. (2002) and tested children in both a moved-syllable and novel-syllable forced-choice task. The results of 140 children show that pauses provide a facilitative effect on rule-learning – also for young learners. Regardless of syllable types, only children who listened to the familiarisation stream containing pauses chose words following the rule above chance-level.
Keywords: school-aged children, prosody, non-adjacent dependencies, statistical learning, language acquisition, artificial grammar learning
How to Cite: Klis, A. v. , van Lieburg, R. , Cheng, L. L. & Levelt, C. C. (2023) “Pauses matter: Rule-learning in children”, Language Development Research. 3(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.34842/2023.0466