Developmental Differences in the Learning and Consolidation of Linguistic Regularities
Abstract
Relative to adults, children have a well-known advantage for learning linguistic regularities, which could be partially driven by their deeper sleep. To examine the relationship between consolidation and language learning across development, children and adults learned a novel article system with an implicit grammatical rule. Participants performed a judgment task on phrases containing the novel articles before and after a night of EEG-monitored sleep. We found that rule sensitivity emerged rapidly in children, whereas it did not emerge until the second session in adults. Children demonstrated better generalization of the rule than adults. Consolidation effects showed a developmental double dissociation, with children showing gains in explicit knowledge and adults showing gains in implicit knowledge after consolidation. Sleep physiology was not associated with any between-session changes. Our results suggest that children’s language learning advantage is more related to their enhanced sensitivity to implicit structures during initial learning, than to subsequent consolidation.