Brown, Smith, Samara, & Wonnacott (pre-print). Semantic cues in language learning: An artificial language study with adult and child learners.

Grammatical regularities may correlate with semantics cues; for instance, the grammatical gender of a noun is often partially predictable from its semantics. However, semantic cues seem to pose difficulties for child learners. We explore whether 6-year-olds and adults generalize over semantic cues, and how this is affected by the extent of exposure (1v4 sessions) and the number of exemplars for each semantic class (type-frequency). Participants were exposed to semi-artificial languages in which nouns co-occurred with novel particles, with particle usage either fully or partially determined by a semantic property of the noun. Subsequent production and comprehension tests showed that both adults and children generalized semantic cues to novel nouns when cues were fully consistent. Adults (but not children) also generalized when cues were partially consistent. However, although generalization increased with exposure, there was no evidence for a role of type-frequency (i.e. no greater generalization when there were more nouns per category). In addition, post-experiment interviews suggested that successful generalization was dependent upon explicit awareness. These results provide additional support for the observation that semantic cues seem to be particularly difficult for children to exploit during the early stages of language acquisition.