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Literacy effects on artificial grammar learning (AGL) with letters and colors: evidence from preschool and primary school children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2021

ANA PAULA SOARES Open the ORCID record for ANA PAULA SOARES [Opens in a new window] ,
ROSA SILVA ,
FREDERICA FARIA ,
MARIA SILVA SANTOS ,
HELENA MENDES OLIVEIRA  and
LUIS JIMÉNEZ
ANA PAULA SOARES*
Affiliation:
Research Group in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
ROSA SILVA
Affiliation:
Research Group in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
FREDERICA FARIA
Affiliation:
Research Group in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
MARIA SILVA SANTOS
Affiliation:
Research Group in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
HELENA MENDES OLIVEIRA
Affiliation:
Research Group in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
LUIS JIMÉNEZ
Affiliation:
Faculty of Psychology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: Ana Paula Soares, Human Cognition Lab, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal. e-mail: asoares@psi.uminho.pt
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Abstract

Literacy affects many aspects of language and cognition, including the shift from a more holistic mode of processing to a more analytical part-based mode of processing. Here we examined whether this shift impacts the ability of preschool and primary school children to learn the rules underlying a finite-state grammar using an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm implemented with either linguistic (letters) or non-linguistic (colors) materials to further examine if children’s AGL performance was modulated by type of stimuli. Both tasks involved a training phase in which half of the preschool children and half of the primary school children were exposed to a set of either letter or color strings without any information about the rules underlying the construction of those strings. Later, in the test phase, they were asked to decide whether a new set of letter or color strings conformed to those rules to test grammar learning. Results showed that only primary school children showed evidence of learning, and, importantly, only with colors. These findings seem to support the view that learning to read promotes reliance on smaller linguistic units that might hinder the ability of first-graders to learn the rules underlying finite-state grammars implemented with linguistic materials.

Keywords

literacyreadingartificial grammar learningstarting big hypothesispreliteratesliteratesdeveloping readersanalytical mode of processingletter processingcolors processing
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 534 - 561
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), University of Minho, and supported by Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028212 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds, and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. The research was also funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad with a research grant to Luis Jiménez (PSI2015-70990-P).

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