THE IMPACT OF CONDITIONING VARIABLES ON THE ACQUISITION OF VARIATION IN ADULT AND CHILD LEARNERS
THE IMPACT OF CONDITIONING VARIABLES ON THE ACQUISITION OF VARIATION IN ADULT AND CHILD LEARNERS
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DOI：
10.1353/lan.2015.0051
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发表时间：
2015-12-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Kam, Carla L. Hudson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kam, Carla L. Hudson
自然人类语言通常包含变异（社会语言学或拉博夫变异），这些变异会从一代人传递到下一代人，但习得研究在很大程度上忽略了这一点，而是专注于语言更确定性的方面。然而，习得理论必须能够解释这两种情况。本文从统计学习框架的角度研究了变异，并探讨了变异对可学习性的贡献。特别是，它探讨了条件变量（即在不同的情况下变化的模式略有不同）是否会导致更好的学习变化相比，当没有条件变量，尽管前者在概念上更困难。从两个实验的数据表明，成人学习者是相当不错的学习模式的条件和无条件的变化，后者的结果复制早期的研究。相比之下，五到七岁的孩子对条件变异和非条件变异的学习结果不同，很少有孩子对条件变异进行规则化或强加确定性模式。然而，没有施加确定性模式的儿童并不一定获得成人所获得的变异模式。
Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores features of variation that contribute to learnability. In particular, it explores whether conditioning variables (i.e. where the pattern of variation is slightly different in different contexts) lead to better learning of variation as compared to when there are no conditioning variables, despite the former being conceptually more difficult. Data from two experiments show that adult learners are fairly good at learning patterns of both conditioned and unconditioned variation, the latter result replicating earlier studies. Five-to-seven-year-old children, in contrast, had different learning outcomes for conditioned versus unconditioned variation, with fewer children regularizing or imposing deterministic patterns on the conditioned variation. However, the children who did not impose deterministic patterns did not necessarily acquire the variation patterns the adults did.