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 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.

与儿童相比，成人在语言学习上的表现更差，这一结论有悖直觉——成人在绝大多数认知任务上都优于儿童，尤其是那些需要付出认知努力的任务（这类能力会持续成熟至成年早期）。本研究旨在探究这些已成熟的、依赖认知努力的能力是否会干扰成人的语言学习，并进一步探讨这种干扰对于成人擅长与不擅长学习的语言维度是否存在差异，其中成人擅长的维度为词语切分（word-segmentation），不擅长的维度为语法（grammar）。实验中，学习者接触了一门由统计结构定义的词汇构成、且词汇隶属于语音学定义范畴（即语法维度）的人工语言（artificial language）。学习过程分为被动与主动努力两种条件：被动组学习者仅被要求倾听实验材料，而主动努力组学习者则被要求完成三项任务之一：1）学习词汇；2）学习语音范畴；3）学习范畴间的顺序。实验结果显示，主动努力组在词汇学习上展现出优势，而被动组则在语音范畴学习上更具优势。由此可见，认知努力反而会对语音范畴的学习造成损害。