Artificial grammar learning in the visual domain

Unrestricted In order to gain a better understanding of how humans acquire language, the present study examined whether participants learned grammar from the distribution of words in a sentence, otherwise known as "distributional cues." In Experiment One, participants read sentences of artificial words aloud while viewing them on a screen. They then answered questions to determine whether they had learned grammar from those sentences. As the auditory vocalization of the sentences may have created an additional auditory component to the acquisition, in Experiment Two, the subjects wore noise-reducing headphones that played white noise to mask the sound of their voices saying the words aloud. In both experiments, participants learned the artificial grammar using distributional cues. There was no evidence from this study, as compared to a similar auditory study (Mintz, 2002), that one modality is superior at processing distributional cues. Therefore the visual modality may be equipped to learn grammar.