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Does Early Unit Size Impact the Formation of Linguistic Predictions? Grammatical Gender as a Case Study

Abu‐Zhaya, Rana; Arnon, Inbal; (2024) Does Early Unit Size Impact the Formation of Linguistic Predictions? Grammatical Gender as a Case Study. Language Learning 10.1111/lang.12638. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article–noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article–noun associations with either segmented input first or unsegmented input first, and tested their learning of the article–noun association and their ability to use articles to predict nouns. Our results showed that participants exposed to unsegmented input first were more likely to treat the article–noun unit as one word and were more accurate at learning the correct article–noun associations. However, participants in the unsegmented-first condition did not show increased gaze to the target compared to those in the segmented-first condition. We discuss how these findings inform our understanding of the challenges that adults face when learning a second language.

Type: Article
Title: Does Early Unit Size Impact the Formation of Linguistic Predictions? Grammatical Gender as a Case Study
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/lang.12638
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lang.12638
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Language Learning published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Keywords: Linguistic predictions; grammatical gender; order of exposure; eye tracking
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10190829
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