The Role of Attention, Language Ability, and Language Experience in Children's Artificial Grammar Learning

The current study examined the role of attention and language ability in nonverbal rule induction performance in a demographically diverse sample of school-age children.

The participants included 43 English-speaking monolingual and 65 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 years. Core Language Index standard scores from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition indexed children's language skills. Rule induction was measured via a visual artificial grammar learning task. Two equally complex finite-state artificial grammars were used. Children learned one grammar in a low attention condition (where children were exposed to symbol sequences with no distractors) and another grammar in a high attention condition (where distractor symbols were presented around the perimeter of the target symbol sequences).

Overall, performance in the high attention condition was significantly worse than performance in the low attention condition. Children with robust language skills performed significantly better in the high attention condition than children with weaker language skills. Despite group differences in socioeconomic status, English language skills, and nonverbal intelligence, monolingual and bilingual children performed similarly to each other in both conditions.

The results suggest that the ability to extract rules from visual input is attenuated by the presence of competing visual information and that language ability, but not bilingualism, may influence rule induction.