Properties of Phonological Markers That Affect the Acquisition of Gender-Like Subclasses

The Role of Prior Experience in Language Acquisition

“…However, in the aX bY language, the co-occurrence restrictions were reliably cued by the distinctive endings on Xs and Ys whereas they were not in the Uncued language (because as and bs predicted words ending in both "ee" and "oo"). Sensitivity to the fact that a-and belements have nonoverlapping distributions typically relies on the presence of cues signaling the category membership of words (Braine, 1987;Frigo and MacDonald, 1998;Gerken et al, 2005). Additionally, in the absence of the distinctive cues to the category membership of X-and Y-elements, the ability to determine that a 1 X 1 (if it had been withheld from familiarization) is grammatical, while the string b 1 X 1 (taken from the other grammar) is not, requires that participants have an excellent memory for the a 2 X 1 string.…”

“…By this view, habituation consisted of zcX and zcY strings (rather than acX and bcY strings), as did test strings (rather than bcX and acY strings), such that for Control infants habituation and test trials could both be considered to contain strings of the same form, and therefore their failure to dishabituate might not have reflected insensitivity to the nonadjacent relations. We should point out that this is unlikely, as several experiments indicate that sensitivity to the fact that a-and b-elements have nonoverlapping distributions typically relies on the presence of cues signaling the category membership of words (Braine, 1987;Frigo and MacDonald, 1998;Gerken et al, 2005), and the Uncued language lacked such cues. A second alternative explanation for Control infants' lack of discrimination is that the adjacent pairings they were exposed to during familiarization occurred nonadjacently in both the habituation and test strings.…”

“…All of the experiments presented here used a category-induction language based on Braine (1987), Frigo andMacDonald (1998), Gerken, Wilson, andLewis (2005), Lakusta (2004), andLany (2003), which we refer to as an aX bY language.…”

“…Also, learning this structure is facilitated when the language has cues signaling X/Y words' category membership (Braine, 1987;Frigo & MacDonald, 1998;Gerken et al, 2005;Gómez & LaKusta, 2004;Wilson, 2002). In these experiments, Xand Y-words were either distinguished by their syllable number, or by the presence of a distinctive ending.…”

“…The a-and b-elements thus predicted nonoverlapping sets, however unlike the aX bY language, syllable number did not cue the sets. Because sensitivity to the fact that a-and b-elements have nonoverlapping distributions typically relies on the presence of cues signaling the category membership of words (Braine, 1987;Frigo and MacDonald, 1998;Gerken et al, 2005;Gomez & Lakusta, 2004), Control infants are unlikely to learn the cooccurrence restrictions in the Uncued language. As with the Experimental language 4…”