The Role of Language Transfer: Spanish Speaking Children’s Success in Artificial Language Production

Abstract

Six year old children have been found to be oblivious to a probabilistically represented gender based-distinction in an artificial language paradigm. In the impetus for this study, unaware of the conditioning factor that determined which of two determiners was appropriate, 6-year-old English monolingual children showed a tendency to regularize their productions, over-relying on only one determiner or the other. In contrast to English monolinguals, Spanish speakers are accustomed to a language which uses gender to classify nouns into grammatically masculine and feminine categories. With this in mind, the current work aimed to determine whether younger native Spanish speaking children would benefit from a possible transfer effect in learning the same artificial language that English-speaking children had had trouble acquiring. In two experiments reported here, Spanish speaking four to five-year old children witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically conditioned by natural gender. The first experiment tested participant’s ability to produce the correct classifier with familiar and novel puppets and the second experiment tested the same participant’s ability to judge which determiner was more appropriate in a forced choice task. In support of the hypothesis, given their familiarity with gender-based determiners in their native language, these participants performed above chance in the artificial language production task and marginally better than the older native English-speaking cohort. These results provide a window through which we can understand the factors that encourage or hinder children’s language learning. Importantly, the results demonstrate the importance of maintaining a child’s native tongue when introducing them to a new language.