Difficulties in Nonadjacent Dependency Learning in French-Learning Toddlers

Purpose: In the past three decades, statistical learning, that is, the capacity to detect patterns and regularities in the environment, has been shown to have an important role in language development. In particular, the ability to detect nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) between linguistic elements that are separated by intervening material seems to be linked to morphosyntactic development. Yet, there are few studies with French-speaking children, and none using artificial language learning methodologies.

Method: We investigated the acquisition of nonadjacent dependencies in 18-month-old (n = 30) and 27-month-old (n = 32) monolingual French-learning children in an adaptation of Gómez (2002) artificial grammar learning study to a central fixation eye-tracking paradigm. After a 2-minute familiarization with three element strings (e.g. /na sokɛ fib/), we monitored looking times for grammatical versus ungrammatical strings in two blocks of 4 test trials each, expecting a novelty effect at 18 months and exploring the behavior at 27 months.

Results: No significant effect of grammaticality was found at either 18 or 27 months for the overall task. However, at 27 months we observed a significant decrease in gaze duration for ungrammatical
test trials between the first and the second block, leading to the emergence of a marginally significant preference for grammatical stimuli in the second block, that could potentially indicate the start of novel NAD learning.

Conclusions: Given the failure to clearly replicate effects observed in the studies with English learning children, we propose several theoretical hypotheses to account for our results and discuss the importance of differences in age and language background as well as methodological parameters— a well-known challenge in research with young children. Further research is needed to develop robust tasks and to better understand the developmental trajectory of nonadjacent dependency processing abilities.