Collaborative Research: Inside Phonological Learning

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

One of the core issues in linguistics is how language is acquired. Do people learn a language the way a bird learns its song, using special-purpose brain mechanisms? Or do they learn it the way they learn chess, using general-purpose intelligence? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding how people learn a first or second language, how language learning is connected to other kinds of learning, how the brain stores its knowledge of language, and how humans evolved the capacity for language. The answer might even be different for different aspects of language, such as sounds vs. vocabulary vs. sentence structure. It is especially important for understanding why language is not always learned successfully, either by children acquiring their first language, or adults learning a second language. At a broad level, understanding how to improve language learning has positive impacts for a society--improved cultural diplomacy, economic growth, increased communication in an immigrant nation--and for individuals--personal fulfillment and cognitive benefits associated with language study. Studies of general-purpose intelligence have identified two separate learning systems which approximately correspond to "reasoning" and "intuition". They are activated by different kinds of learning situation, cause different electrical activity in the brain, and are good at learning patterns with different structures. It is not known how these two systems are involved in language acquisition. This project asks how reasoning and intuition are involved in the second-language acquisition of the "sound pattern of a language--that is, how sounds combine to form larger units like syllables and words. The project also asks whether certain patterns are easier to learn either due to their structure or content. The researchers will teach people invented languages whose properties can be manipulated, and measure both learning performance and the brain's electrical response to ask whether the language learners show the characteristic signatures of reasoning and intuition found in learning non-linguistic patterns, or whether different mechanisms are being used. The results will illuminate factors that affect the success of language learning. To foster robust and reliable science in the area of language learning, the investigators will disseminate, for each of the project's experiments, "replication kits" that will include all stimulus files, instructions for setting up the experiments on the user's computer, and software scripts for running the experiments and for data analysis.