Form-meaning connections implicit learning: a psycholinguistic investigation

Implicit statistical learning is key to understanding language acquisition throughout our lives. While there is strong evidence for implicit learning of form associations, research on implicit learning of form-meaning connections, especially in language, is limited and inconclusive. This research presents two experiments using eye-tracking to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning connections in children and adults in real-time. Experiment 1 shows that French 3-to-4-year-olds, as well as French and Brazilian adults, can infer the meanings of novel verbs based on grammatical cues for future and present tense. Participants listened to sentences containing novel verbs either in the present or future tense and looked towards one of two possible referents for the novel verbs. Learning was measured through differences in conditions using cluster-based permutation analysis over time. This experiment demonstrates that both children and adults use syntactic contexts to build implicit knowledge about novel verbs. Experiment 2 extends this investigation to grammatical form-functional meaning connections. Participants were exposed to a novel grammatical component replacing future and present tense morphology during a familiarization phase without being informed of its meaning. The test phase assessed whether they could use this new grammatical element to infer the meanings of novel verbs by selecting between two referents. A post-experiment questionnaire evaluated whether any explicit understanding of the novel grammatical element emerged during the experiment. Data collection for Experiment 2 is currently underway in Brazil.