What is it about?
When learning to speak their native language, children often make mistakes, saying things like "The sheet's slipping me". But how do they learn to stop making these mistakes? One idea is that they hear slip being used in lots of other ways (e.g., "She slipped over") and so think "Oh, if you could say 'The sheet's slipping me' I would have heard it by now". A different idea is that children learning a competing way to say the same think, and so think "Oh, you have to say 'the sheet's making me slip" not "the sheet's slipping me". In this study we tested these two possibilities by teaching children and adults, and found very strong evidence for the second ("competing ways to say it") theory.
Featured Image
Photo by Picsea on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This finding is important as it suggests ways that children can learn - and adults can potentially help them - to avoid errors when learning to speak.
Perspectives
From a personal perspective, this is a particularly exciting study as it's the first to directly test these theories with made up novel languages.
Ben Ambridge
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment: Evidence from artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children., Psychological Review, June 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/rev0000463.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
