Hickey, A. J. 1 , Mirkovic, J. 2, 1 & Hayiou-Thomas, M. E. 1
1 University of York
2 York St John University
The learning and generalisation of grammatical regularities is fundamental to successful language acquisition and use. Statistical learning research has considered how this process occurs through implicit detection and assimilation of regularities in the linguistic input. This study focuses on how adults and children generalise learned regularities and explores the role of explicit knowledge in this process. Across three experiments, adults and children were trained on an artificial language using phonological, distributional and semantic cues to create a grammatical gender-like noun class system. The type of training and the level of initial learning of the novel words were manipulated. We assessed generalisation performance for three different types of cues, and examined the role of explicit knowledge in each. Participants? generalisation abilities varied across the different cues and types of training. Explicit knowledge of the regularities was associated with generalisation performance in adults but not children, even when adult word level knowledge was similar to children?s. The implications of these results for developmental theories of grammatical generalisation are discussed.