Acquisition Process of a Miniature Artificial Language through an Audio-lingual Procedure.

十对本科生在以下两种不同的条件下学习了一种微型人工语言。在活动状态下，一名受试者通过与作为语言导师的个人计算机(NEC PC-9801)的互动学习MAL。受试者听计算机提供的MAL例句，并在彩色CRT上直观地显示它们的含义。受试者产生的每个MAL句子都由连接到计算机的语音识别单元(NEC SR-150)处理，该单元分析句子并给出反馈。在被动条件下，被试中的另一组只通过观察被试与电脑之间的相互作用来学习相同的学习策略。虽然行为主义学习理论可以预测积极学习者的优异表现，但结果恰恰相反。主动学习者的学习成绩不佳归因于语音识别错误。另外两个有10对受试者参加的实验证实了这一结论。

Ten pairs of undergraduates learned a miniature, artificial language (MAL) under the following two different conditions. Under the Active condition, one subject learned the MAL through interactions with a personal computer, (NEC PC-9801) that acted as language tutor. The subject listened to sample MAL sentences provided by the computer along with their meaning visually presented on the color CRT. Each MAL sentence the subject produced was processed by the speech recognition unit (NEC SR-150) attached to the computer that parsed the sentence and gave a feedback. Under the Passive condition, the other of the pair, learned the same MAL through only observing the interactions between the Active subject and the computer. Although the Behaviorist learning theories would predict the superior performances of the Active learners, the results were the opposite. The poor performances of the Active learners were attributed to the speech recognition errors. Two additional experiments with ten pairs of subjects each confirmed this conclusion.