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Beyond input: Language learners produce novel relative clause types without exposure
Adam M Morgan1, Victor S Ferreira2
1NYU School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, 227 E 30th St, 8th Floor, New York NY 10016 USA.
Journal of Cognitive Psychology (Hove, England)
|September 6, 2021
Summary
Speakers can learn abstract syntactic structures beyond direct exposure. Learning one type of a grammatical rule, like relative clauses, implies understanding all types, demonstrating higher-level cognitive abstraction.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Psychology
Background:
- Syntax involves hierarchical representations for sentence construction.
- Theories propose a higher level of abstract representation guiding sentence formation.
- Experimental evidence for this higher level of abstraction is currently lacking.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the existence of a higher level of abstract syntactic representation.
- To determine if speakers can generalize learned syntactic structures to untrained types.
- To test the hypothesis that learning one type of a grammatical structure implies learning a general rule.
Main Methods:
- Participants were taught a novel grammar for specific types of relative clauses.
- Knowledge of untrained relative clause types was subsequently tested.
- Experimental design focused on distinguishing between specific and general syntactic representations.
Main Results:
- Participants consistently produced untrained types of relative clauses after learning a subset.
- This generalization suggests a higher level of abstract syntactic knowledge.
- Findings support the existence of abstract representations beyond direct input.
Conclusions:
- The study provides experimental evidence for a higher level of abstract syntactic representation.
- This abstract knowledge allows speakers to generate novel structures.
- The findings have implications for understanding language acquisition and cognitive processing.
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