The Influence of Language-specific Auditory Cues on the Learnability of Center-embedded Recursion

The learnability of center-embedded recursive structures has attracted much attention (Corballis, 2007; Friederici, 2004; Rey, Perruchet, & Fagot, 2012). However, most of the previous studies adopted the artificial grammar learning paradigm (Reber, 1967) and did not apply natural language stimuli. Rather, they applied synthetic meaningless training materials, which hardly represent the richness and complexity of natural language. Accordingly, in the current study, we attempt to tighten the link between artificial language learning and natural language acquisition in the auditory modality, by enriching our learning environment with phonological cues that occur in natural, spoken information; in particular, Chinese tones. In a grammaticality judgment task, we examined the syntactical processing by participants from different language backgrounds. Through the cross-language comparison between Chinese and Dutch native speakers, we aim to test the influence of language-specific phonological cues on processing complex linguistic structures. The results showed that tones had a more beneficial learning effect for Chinese than for Dutch participants. In other words, when participants learned a new language, they were likely to bring their own language routines implicitly from the familiar native language into processing the unfamiliar one.