Mireia Marimon 1, Andrea Hofmann 1, João Veríssimo 1,2, Claudia Männel 3,4, Angela D. Friederici 3, Barbara Höhle 1, Isabell Wartenburger 1 1 Cognitive Sciences, Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany 2 School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal 3 Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany 4 Department of Audiology and Phoniatrics, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
To acquire their native language, infants must learn the relations between the individual words, known as non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). NADs consist of statistically reliable relation-ships between two elements separated by intervening elements. Infants seem to learn NADs implicitly through passive listening and there is evidence for a shift from associative learning to more controlled learning of NADs after 2 years of age (van der Kant et al., 2020), potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. Lammertink et al. (2019) showed in a Serial Reaction Time task that 6- to 11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times increased when presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in 4- to 8-year-olds in a web-based game-like setting. Children were exposed to Italian NAD phrases and had to monitor a target syllable (and or are), which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children performed a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to select the second element of the NAD. Our findings show that, despite large data variability, 4- to 8-year-olds are sensitive to NADs. On average, children show the expected differences in reaction times in the Serial Reaction Time task and transferred the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD learning in child-hood and the practical impact of web-based data collection.
