Aging and the statistical learning of grammatical form classes.
Language learners must place unfamiliar words into categories, often with few explicit indicators about when and how that word can be used grammatically. Reeder, Newport, and Aslin (2013) showed that college students can learn grammatical form classes from an artificial language by relying solely on distributional information (i.e., contextual cues in the input). Here, 2 experiments revealed that healthy older adults also show such statistical learning, though they are poorer than young at distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical strings. This finding expands knowledge of which aspects of learning vary with aging, with potential implications for second language learning in late adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record
Department of Psychology, Georgetown University.
Jessica F
JF
Schwab
Department of Neurology, Georgetown University.
Kathryn D
KD
Schuler
Department of Psychology, Georgetown University.
Chelsea M
CM
Stillman
Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Department of Neurology.
Elissa L
EL
Newport
Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Department of Neurology.
James H
JH
Howard
Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Department of Neurology.
Darlene V
DV
Howard
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult