Abstract
A number of studies in SLA and developmental psychology have shown that both children and adults can acquire nonnative word orders after a relatively short amount of exposure to a miniature language with natural-syntax characteristics in implicit instruction conditions. Although there is some evidence that in these conditions adult L2 learning can extend to morphemes (e.g., gender, case), little attention has been given to child-learning of morphology to date. In this pilot study six nine-year-olds and eight adults (all L1 English monolinguals) were exposed over three consecutive days to auditory sentence stimuli in BrocantoJ, a miniature language mirroring the word order and morphology of Japanese, in the context of a computer game similar to chess. Accuracy in performing a game move after hearing a sentence stimulus that described it, and accuracy in a forced-choice task, were used as measures of overall language comprehension and comprehension of the relationship between an argument’s syntactic realization and its thematic function (linking). The data showed that both groups performed significantly above chance overall and on linking rules. However, adults performed significantly better than children in the first two sessions (p < 0.01), though the gap disappeared by the third day. Also, initial evidence showed that, at least for a subset of the sentence stimuli, both children and adults were successfully relying exclusively on case marking to interpret NP thematic functions.
Highlights
In the last twenty-five years a growing body of research has investigated the nature of learners’ early m ental representations of novel miniature languages with n atural-l anguage characteristics
Compared to previous laboratory research, which with few exceptions has tended to adopt a cross-sectional perspective, the present study focuses on the development of child and adult comprehension of word order and linking in a novel L2 over time
The study found evidence of above-chance learning of the artificial language, both overall as well as with respect to linking
Summary
In the last twenty-five years a growing body of research has investigated the nature of learners’ early m ental representations of novel miniature languages with n atural-l anguage characteristics. Artificial languages (ALs) have been used to study a variety of linguistic properties, a substantial amount of research in the field has developed in the area of morphosyntax. Overall, these studies found evidence that adults can successfully learn novel morphosyntactic forms as well as form-meaning mappings after a relatively short amount of exposure to the new language (less than an hour to a few days), but not much research to date has investigated the ability of younger learners to learn m orphology or establish form-meaning relationships as a result of learning novel linguistic forms.
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