title: When it hurts (and helps) to try: the role of effort in language learning.
abstract: Compared to children, adults are bad at learning language. This is counterintuitive; adults outperform children on most measures of cognition, especially those that involve effort (which continue to mature into early adulthood). The present study asks whether these mature effortful abilities interfere with language learning in adults and further, whether interference occurs equally for aspects of language that adults are good (word-segmentation) versus bad (grammar) at learning. Learners were exposed to an artificial language comprised of statistically defined words that belong to phonologically defined categories (grammar). Exposure occurred under passive or effortful conditions. Passive learners were told to listen while effortful learners were instructed to try to 1) learn the words, 2) learn the categories, or 3) learn the category-order. Effortful learners showed an advantage for learning words while passive learners showed an advantage for learning the categories. Effort can therefore hurt the learning of categories.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
authors.forename: Amy S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Finn
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Taraz
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Allison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kraus
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
authors.forename: Carla L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Hudson Kam
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning; D055815:Young Adult