Children’s Simultaneous or Successive Acquisition of Vocabulary and Grammar: Evidence from Cross-situational Learning

Recent evidence (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2021; Rebuschat et al., 2021) showed that adult learners can acquire words and grammar simultaneously by tracking cross-situational statistics. In this study, we tested whether cross-situational learning (CSL) is powerful enough to support simultaneous learning in younger learners. Twenty children (ages 8 to 9) were exposed to a complex artificial language comprising novel nouns, verbs, case markers, with variable word order by means of a CSL paradigm, adapted from Rebuschat et al. (2021). We found that participants were rapidly able to learn the novel word order but failed to learn the novel vocabulary. The results can shed light on the understanding of differences in CSL across the life span and provide further empirical evidence for the cognitive underpinnings of child-adult differences in the earliest stages of language acquisition.