Exploring language acquisition in children with a miniature artificial language: Effects of item and pattern frequency, arbitrary subclasses, and correction

Abstract

Very little of the artificial language experimentation in the literature has been done with children, although children are the primary target population to which experimenters wish to generalize. For this reason, we used children (7–10 years old) to explore the acquisition of a miniature artificial language with rules, patterns, subpatterns, and exceptions that are quite like those found in inflectional systems of natural languages. The first goal of the study was to explore two aspects of linguistic input—how frequency of presentation affects the relative roles of rote and rule or pattern learning, and the learnability of arbitrary subclasses. A second goal was to determine the effects of immediate corrective feedback on acquisition; and a third goal was to examine adult-child differences in learning. Overwhelmingly, the children learned via rules rather than by rote, but failed to distinguish the arbitrary subclasses. Frequency of presentation had specific effects on the acquisition of items and patterns. The immediacy of feedback had no significant effect on learning. Although there was a small (though significant) difference between the performance of the children and that of some adult subjects, overall, the results support the existence of a class of pattern learning skills that is common to children and adults and includes some aspects of syntax acquisition.