Developmental Changes
It is crucial to ask how maturation may affect the use of a distributional learning mechanism for acquiring language structures like grammatical categories. Given the information processing limitations of young children and the complexity of the computational processes in distributional learning, it may initially seem unreasonable to assume that children are adult-like in their tracking of environmental statistics. Yet there is an extensive literature demonstrating the utility of statistical learning and distributional information in domains such as word segmentation (e.g., Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996) and it seems clear that infants, children, and adults are quite capable of tracking distributional patterns in the input for lower levels of language structure. As a next step, we have begun to test children (aged 7-10) in our (Q)AXB(R) paradigm to see whether they juggle these distributional variables in the same way as adults, or in entirely different ways. Ultimately, we hope to craft a paradigm that would allow for testing younger children (e.g., 2-5 year-olds, a particularly interesting window for syntax acquisition), who have difficulty in our usual paradigm, but who are too old to sit through traditional infant looking/listening studies.