Kindergarteners Use Cross-Situational Statistics to Infer the Meaning of Grammatical Elements

Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Yet, it is unclear to what extent statistical learning is involved in more naturalistic settings, when young children have to acquire meaningful grammatical elements. In the present study, we address these points, by investigating whether statistical learning is involved in acquiring a morpho-syntactic structure from input that resembles natural languages more closely. We exposed 50 kindergarteners (M = 5 years, 5 months) to a miniature language in which they had to learn a grammatical marker that expressed number, and which could only be acquired on the basis of the distributional properties in the input. Half of the children performed an attention check during the experiment. Results show that young children are able to learn this meaning. We found no clear evidence that facilitating attention to the input increases learning performance.