Abstract
AbstractMany studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit, as often assumed. We trained 63 kindergarteners on a miniature language and assessed learning using a picture‐matching task. We used an opt‐out task to measure whether the kindergarteners possessed awareness of an acquired meaningful grammatical marker. In the opt‐out paradigm, participants demonstrate awareness by expressing uncertainty through a nonverbal response: opting out. Our results are compatible with an earlier study of which the present study is a partial replication, suggesting that kindergarteners can acquire this marker from distributional properties in the input. Furthermore, although none of the children could verbalize knowledge of the structure during exit interviews, their behavior during the opt‐out task indicated that they developed awareness of it.
Highlights
When learners acquire a language, they have to accomplish several seemingly distinct tasks
We cannot claim that our kindergartener participants became sensitive to this regularity, we see a tendency toward such an effect
As well as investigating whether young children develop awareness during learning, this study provided an opportunity to replicate our findings from an earlier study (Spit et al, 2020), in which we demonstrated that a meaningful grammatical marker could be learned on the basis of statistical information
Summary
When learners acquire a language, they have to accomplish several seemingly distinct tasks. Accumulating evidence suggests that these tasks might be accomplished through the learners’ ability to detect statistical regularities within linguistic input (e.g., Erickson & Thiessen, 2015; Frost & Monaghan, 2016; Romberg & Saffran, 2010; Walker, Monaghan, Schoetensack, & Rebuschat, 2020). Evidence that such statistical learning plays a role in different domains of language comes from several types of task results. Awareness in this classical view is an all-or-nothing phenomenon; someone is either aware of something or not
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