When it hurts (and helps) to try: the role of effort in language learning

When it hurts (and helps) to try: the role of effort in language learning

Compared to children, adults are bad at learning language. This is counterintuitive; adults outperform children on most measures of cognition, especially those that involve effort (which continue to mature into early adulthood). The present study asks whether these mature effortful abilities interfe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-07, Vol.9 (7), p.e101806-e101806
Main Authors: Finn, Amy S, Lee, Taraz, Kraus, Allison, Hudson Kam, Carla L
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
Artificial languages
Biology and Life Sciences
Categories
Children
Cognition
Cognitive ability
Developmental psychology
Female
Grammar
Humans
Hypotheses
Language
Language acquisition
Language Development
Learning
Linguistic interference
Linguistics
Male
Markov analysis
Memory
Native language acquisition
Neural networks
Neurosciences
Psychology
Science
Segmentation
Social Sciences
Syntax
Verbal Learning
Word meaning
Young Adult
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Description
Summary:Compared to children, adults are bad at learning language. This is counterintuitive; adults outperform children on most measures of cognition, especially those that involve effort (which continue to mature into early adulthood). The present study asks whether these mature effortful abilities interfere with language learning in adults and further, whether interference occurs equally for aspects of language that adults are good (word-segmentation) versus bad (grammar) at learning. Learners were exposed to an artificial language comprised of statistically defined words that belong to phonologically defined categories (grammar). Exposure occurred under passive or effortful conditions. Passive learners were told to listen while effortful learners were instructed to try to 1) learn the words, 2) learn the categories, or 3) learn the category-order. Effortful learners showed an advantage for learning words while passive learners showed an advantage for learning the categories. Effort can therefore hurt the learning of categories.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203