Artificial grammar learning and the role of prosodic cues

All are welcome at this Linguistics and Phonetics guest talk by Vesna Stojanovik, University of Reading. Venue: Parkinson B08, with coffee/tea and cake in the Linguistics foyer after the talk. The talk is organized by Diane Nelson.

Artificial grammar learning and the role of prosodic cues in Williams syndrome and in typical development

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is an empirical paradigm which investigates basic pattern- and structural processing. It can inform how higher cognitive functions, such as language use, take place. The current study used AGL to assess how children with Williams syndrome (WS) (n=16) extract patterns in structured sequences of synthetic speech, how they compare to typically developing (TD) children (n=60), and how prosodic cues affect learning. The results showed that TD children relied mainly on rule-based generalization when making judgements about the acceptability of sequences, whereas children with WS relied on familiarity with specific stimulus combinations. Younger TD participants (mean age 5 years 1 month), whose non-verbal abilities were within the range of the WS group, showed less evidence of relying on grammaticality compared to older TD participants (mean age 8 years 7 months). In absence of prosodic cues, only the children with WS did not demonstrate evidence of learning. The preliminary conclusions of the study are that in children and adolescents with WS, the transition to rule-based processing in language does not keep pace with TD children and may be an indication of differences in neuro-cognitive mechanisms.