Summary:
Purpose: In the past three decades, statistical learning, that is, the capacity to
detect patterns and regularities in the environment, has been shown to have an
important role in language development. In particular, the ability to detect nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) between linguistic elements that are separated
by intervening material seems to be linked to morphosyntactic development.
However, there are few studies with French-speaking children, and none using
artificial language learning methodologies.
Method: We investigated the acquisition of NADs in 18-month-old (n = 30) and
27-month-old (n = 32) monolingual French-learning children in an adaptation of
Gómez (2002) artificial grammar learning study to a central fixation eye-tracking
paradigm. After a 2-min familiarization with three element strings (e.g., /na sokɛ
fib/), we monitored looking times for grammatical versus ungrammatical strings
in two blocks of four test trials each, expecting a novelty effect at 18 months
and exploring the behavior at 27 months.
Results: No significant effect of grammaticality was found at either 18 or
27 months for the overall task. However, at 27 months, we observed a significant decrease in gaze duration for ungrammatical test trials between the first
and the second blocks, together with a tendency to look longer at grammatical
stimuli in the second block, a pattern of results that, if confirmed in future studies, might indicate the start of novel NAD learning.
Conclusions: Given the failure to clearly replicate effects observed in the studies
with English-learning children, we propose several theoretical hypotheses to
account for our results and discuss the importance of differences in age and language background as well as methodological parameters, a well-known challenge
in research with young children. Further research is needed to develop robust tasks
and to better understand the developmental trajectory of NAD processing abilities.
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