Do children learn from their mistakes? A registered report evaluating error-based theories of language acquisition

Error-based theories of language acquisition suggest that children, like adults, continuously make and evaluate predictions in order to reach an adult-like state of language use. However, while these theories have become extremely influential, their central claim - that unpredictable input leads to higher rates of lasting change in linguistic representations – has scarcely been tested. We designed a prime surprisal-based intervention study to assess this claim.

As predicted, both 5- to 6-year-old children (n=72) and adults (n=72) showed a pre- to post-test shift towards producing the dative syntactic structure they were exposed to in surprising sentences. The effect was significant in both age groups together, and in the child group separately when participants with ceiling performance in the pre-test were excluded.  Secondary predictions were not upheld: there were no verb-based learning effects and there was only reliable evidence for immediate prime surprisal effects in the adult,...

基于错误的语言习得理论（Error-based theories of language acquisition）认为，儿童与成人一样，会持续生成并评估预测，以达成成人化的语言使用状态。尽管这类理论已极具影响力，但其核心主张——即不可预测的语言输入会使语言表征（linguistic representations）产生更高比例的持久变化——几乎未得到实证检验。为此，我们设计了一项基于预激活惊喜值（prime surprisal）的干预实验研究，以验证这一主张。
正如预期，5至6岁儿童（n=72）与成人（n=72）均出现了前测至后测的偏移，更倾向于产出在高惊喜值语句中接触过的与格句法结构。该效应在全体被试群体中均显著；若排除前测中出现天花板效应表现的被试，儿童群体的效应同样显著。次要预测未得到验证：未发现基于动词的学习效应，且仅在成人被试中存在可靠的即时预激活惊喜值效应证据。