Abstract
Adults and children acquire knowledge of the structure of their environment on the basis of repeated exposure to samples of structured stimuli. In the study of inductive learning, a straightforward issue is how much sample information is needed to learn the structure. The present study distinguishes between two measures for the amount of information in the sample: set size and the extent to which the set of exemplars statistically covers the underlying structure. In an artificial grammar learning experiment, learning was affected by the sample’s statistical coverage of the grammar, but not by its mere size. Our result suggests an alternative explanation of the set size effects on learning found in previous studies (McAndrews & Moscovitch, 1985; Meulemans & Van der Linden, 1997), because, as we argue, set size was confounded with statistical coverage in these studies. nt]mis|This research was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We thank Jarry Porsius for his help with the data analyses.
Article PDF
References
Alonso, M. A., Diez, E., & Fernandez, A. (2007, November). Effects of backward associative strength on the false recognition of words. Poster presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA.
Brainerd, C. J., & Wright, R. (2005). Forward association, backward association, and the false-memory illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 31, 554–567.
Charniak, E. (1993). Statistical language learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chater, N., & Manning, C. D. (2006). Probabilistic models of language processing and acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 335–344.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gold, E. M. (1967). Language identification in the limit. Information & Control, 10, 447–474.
Horning, J. J. (1969). A study of grammatical inference (Tech. Rep. CS 139). Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Computer Science Department.
Jamieson, R. K., & Mewhort, D. J. K. (2005). The influence of grammatical, local, and organizational redundancy on implicit learning: An analysis using information theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 31, 9–23.
Kinder, A., & Assmann, A. (2000). Learning artificial grammars: No evidence for the acquisition of rules. Memory & Cognition, 28, 1321–1332.
Knowlton, B. J., & Squire, L. R. (1994). The information acquired during artificial grammar learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 20, 79–91.
Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 831–843.
Marcus, G. F. (1993). Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition, 46, 53–85.
McAndrews, M. P., & Moscovitch, M. (1985). Rule-based and exemplar-based classification in artificial grammar learning. Memory & Cognition, 13, 469–475.
Meulemans, T., & Van der Linden, M. (1997). Associative chunk strength in artificial grammar learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 23, 1007–1028.
Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science, 14, 11–28.
Philips, J. R. (1973). Syntax and vocabulary of mothers’ speech to young children: Age and sex comparisons. Child Development, 44, 182–185.
Pine, J. M. (1994). The language of primary caregivers. In C. Gallaway & B. J. Richards (Eds.), Input and interaction in language acquisition (pp. 15–37). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
Poletiek, F. H. (2006). Natural sampling of stimuli in (artificial) grammar learning. In K. Fiedler & P. Juslin (Eds.), Information sampling and adaptive cognition (pp. 440–455). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poletiek, F. H., & Chater, N. (2006). Grammar induction profits from representative stimulus sampling. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1968–1973). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Poletiek, F. H., & Wolters, G. (2009). What is learned about fragments in artificial grammar learning? A transitional probabilities approach. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 868–876.
Pothos, E. M. (2007). Theories of artificial grammar learning. Psychological Bulletin, 133, 227–244.
Pothos, E. M., & Bailey, T. M. (1999). An entropy model of artificial grammar learning. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 549–554). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Reber, R., & Perruchet, P. (2003). The use of control groups in artificial grammar learning. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 97–115.
Redington, M., Chater, N., & Finch, S. (1998). Distributional information: A powerful cue for acquiring syntactic categories. Cognitive Science, 22, 425–469.
Regehr, G., & Brooks, L. R. (1993). Perceptual manifestations of an analytic structure: The priority of holistic individuation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 92–114.
Robinson, K. J., & Roediger, H. L., III (1997). Associative processes in false recall and false recognition. Psychological Science, 8, 231–237.
Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented on lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 21, 803–814.
Snow, C. E. (1972). Mothers’ speech to children learning language. Child Development, 43, 549–565.
Van der Mude, A., & Walker, A. (1978). On the inference of stochastic regular grammars. Information & Control, 38, 310–329.
Vokey, J. R., & Brooks, L. R. (1992). The salience of item knowledge in learning artificial grammars. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 18, 328–344.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Poletiek, F.H., van Schijndel, T.J.P. Stimulus set size and statistical coverage of the grammar in artificial grammar learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16, 1058–1064 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.6.1058
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.6.1058