Kindergarteners use cross-situational statistics to infer the meaning of grammatical elements

Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in the linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated whether such learning is also involved in acquiring a morpho-syntactic structure that carries meaning. We exposed children to a miniature language in which children 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. Results of a study with 50 kindergartners (M = 5;5) show that young children are able to infer this meaning statistically.