Previous research on speakers' abilities to track non-adjacent dependencies (e.g., vowels or consonants that co-occur across syllables) in artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks has shown that the acquisition of these patterns is extremely difficult (e.g. Newport&Aslin 2004; Gómez 2002; Bonatti, PenÞa, Nespor&Mehler 2005). One assumption made in this literature is that all speakers of all languages should be capable of tracking these patterns even when the native language of those speakers contains no such non-adjacent dependencies. This dissertation questions this assumption by testing whether native Khalkha Mongolian speakers attend to and track the frequency of vowel patterns and harmonic class size in their language. It also tests their ability to acquire non-adjacent vocalic dependencies in AGL tasks.Because Khalkha displays [ATR] vowel harmony (Svantesson, Tsendina, Karlsson&Franzén 2005) which restricts vowel co-occurrences, it was hypothesized that Khalkha speakers are biased towards attending to the frequency and form with which these vowel patterns occur. The results of three experiments indicated that Khalkha speakers both attend to and track the frequency with which vowel patterns occur. These results also indicate that Khalkha speakers build abstract categories based on the relative token numbers of [+ATR] and [-ATR]harmonic spans.Khalkha speakers were further tested in three experiments which focused on speakers' ability to acquire novel non-adjacent vocalic dependencies in AGL tasks. The results indicated that participants successfully acquired vocalic dependencies (both harmonic and disharmonic) in all three experiments. These results indicate that Khalkha speakers' attention is biased towards vowels, regardless of harmonic status of the item.Collectively, these results highlight the role of language-specific phonology in the ways that speakers abstract and utilize phonological information. The special status of harmonic vowel patterns and harmonic class size are new variables with which to conduct future research on vowel harmonic languages and with vowel harmonic language speakers. The effects of language-specific phonology on speech perception and lexical access must be considered a crucial aspect in future psycholinguistic research, particularly in regards to the aspects of language toward which speakers attend.

Children learn their first language simply by listening to the linguistic utterances provided by their caregivers and other speakers around them. In order to extract meaning and grammatical rules from these utterances, children must track regularities in the input, which are omnipresent in language. The ability to discover and adapt to these statistical regularities in the input is termed statistical learning and has been suggested to be one of the key mechanisms underlying language acquisition. In this thesis, I investigated a special case of statistical learning, non-adjacent dependency (NAD) learning. NADs are grammatical dependencies between distant elements in an utterance, such as is and -ing in the sentence Mary is walking. I examined which factors play a role in the development of NAD learning by illuminating this process from different stand points: the first study compares NAD learning in the linguistic and the non-linguistic domain during the earliest stages of development, at 4 months of age. This study suggests that at this age, NAD learning seems to be domain-specific to language. The second study puts a spotlight on the development of NAD learning in the linguistic domain and proposes that there may be a sensitive period for linguistic NAD learning during early childhood. Finally, the third study shows that children can not only recall newly learned NADs in a test immediately following familiarization, but also recall them after a retention period, which is critical to show more long-term learning. Overall, the findings in this thesis further illuminate how NADs, as a spotlight into language acquisition, are learned, stored in memory, and recalled.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2017-05-15T13:55:22Z No. of bitstreams: 1 milenecristinedecastroteixeiralaguardia.pdf: 2174544 bytes, checksum: 2efb54d1db55344c6cc5db2a04382473 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2017-05-17T15:59:07Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 milenecristinedecastroteixeiralaguardia.pdf: 2174544 bytes, checksum: 2efb54d1db55344c6cc5db2a04382473 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-17T15:59:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 milenecristinedecastroteixeiralaguardia.pdf: 2174544 bytes, checksum: 2efb54d1db55344c6cc5db2a04382473 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-11-03 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este estudo diz respeito às etapas iniciais da aquisição lexical, focalizando a capacidade de o bebê identificar, abstrair e generalizar padrões de dependências não-adjacentes (DNAs) nos enunciados linguísticos e de usá-los na categorização inicial de elementos do léxico. Nossa tese é que o estabelecimento de relações entre elementos de DNAs é parte da etapa inicial de aquisição lexical e que, para tal estabelecimento, além de habilidades perceptuais, faz-se necessário o uso de habilidades computacionais – de manipulação de símbolos através de algoritmos – que torne possíveis (i) o reconhecimento e a identificação de elementos interrelacionados, que se apresentam em configuração de DNAs, e (ii) a abstração e generalização desses padrões a novos estímulos. DNAs são definidas como a co-ocorrência de marcadores morfossintáticos e/ou fonológicos, com material interveniente. Elegeram-se as DNAs como objeto de estudo por serem altamente frequentes nas línguas naturais e expressarem relações morfossintáticas (p.ex., concordância verbal, nominal de gênero e/ou de número etc.). Trabalhos com línguas artificiais (SAFFRAN et al 1996; GOMEZ et al. 2006; GOMEZ & MAYE, 2005; GOMEZ & LAKUSTA, 2004; LANGUS et al 2012 ; VAN DEN BOS et al 2012) sustentam que habilidades estatísticas e probabilísticas, de domínio geral, subjazem ao tratamento de DNAs por bebês e adultos. Nossa hipótese, em consonância com Marcus et al. (1999) e Peña et al. (2002), é que tais habilidades, sozinhas, não dão conta do tratamento de DNAs em língua natural e, portanto, bebês recorrem tanto a mecanismos gerais quanto a mecanismos computacionais/simbólicos, especificamente linguísticos, na aquisição de uma língua. Duas atividades experimentais foram desenvolvidas, com os seguintes objetivos específicos: (i) investigar se em ambiente prosódico determinado – alinhadas à fronteiras de sintagmas fonológicos – DNAs seriam mais facilmente percebidas por bebês do que em ambientes em que estão distantes de fronteiras fonológicas (Experimento 1 – participantes: bebês canadenses e bebês brasileiros, com média de idade de 11 meses); (ii) investigar se bebês são capazes de categorizar linguisticamente os elementos do léxico a partir do reconhecimento, abstração e generalização de DNAs (Experimento 2- participantes: bebês brasileiros, com média de idade de 11 meses). Nossos resultados são discutidos a partir de uma abordagem mista/integrada, que assume habilidades gerais e especificamente linguísticas no tratamento de enunciados pelo bebê durante o processo inicial de aquisição (GERVAIN & MEHLER, 2010; ENDRESS, NESPOR & MEHLER, 2009) e na hipótese do Bootstrapping prosódico (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997, 2008) e indicam que um ambiente prosódico específico (presença de fronteiras de sintagmas fonológicos) favorece o reconhecimento, abstração e generalização de DNAs e que estas favorecem a categorização inicial de itens do léxico. / This study investigates the initial stages of language acquisition by focusing on infant’s ability to identify, abstract and generalize non adjacent dependency (NAD) patterns in linguistic stimuli and also use them in initial word categorization. NAD is defined as the cooccurrence of morphosyntactic and/or phonological markers over one (or more) intervening element. Our thesis is that the identification of NAD relationships is part of initial lexical acquisition. Infants use perceptual and computational abilities in order to (i) recognize the related terms which appears in NAD configuration, and (ii) abstract and generalize these patterns to new stimuli. NAD was chosen as focus of this study since they are highly frequent elements in natural languages and they express morphosyntactic agreement ( verbal and noun ones). Research on NAD learning using artificial languages argue that statistical and probabilistic abilities, which belong to general cognitive domains, underlie the NAD treatment by infants and adults (SAFFRAN et al 1996; GOMEZ et al. 2006; GOMEZ & MAYE, 2005; GOMEZ & LAKUSTA, 2004; LANGUS et al 2012 ; VAN DEN BOS et al 2012). Our hypothesis, according to Marcus et al. (1999) e Peña et al. (2002), is that infants use as domain general mechanisms as well computational/symbolic, domain specific mechanisms are also necessary to NAD learning. Two experiments were conducted in order to: (i) explore if NAD in a specific prosodic context – aligned to phonological phrase boundary – are better perceived by 11-month-old infants than when they are far from a phonological phrase boundary (Experiment 1 – Canadian and Brazilian infants; (ii) to explore if 11-month-old infants can track and represent NAD at an abstract level and use them to categorize novel content words (Experiment 2 – Brazilian infants. Our results suggest that NAD aligned to prosodic phrase boundaries facilitate its recognition, abstraction and generalization and that abstract level representation of NAD promotes the initial word categorization. Taken together, our results are consistent with the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997, 2008) and lend support to an integrated approach with assumes that general and specific domain abilities are necessary for language acquisition (GERVAIN & MEHLER, 2010; ENDRESS, NESPOR & MEHLER, 2009).

The regular behavior of sound sources helps us to make sense of the auditory environment. Regular patterns may, for instance, convey information on the identity of a sound source (such as the acoustic signature of a train moving on the rails). Yet typically, this signature overlaps in time with signals emitted from other sound sources. It is generally assumed that auditory regularity extraction cannot operate upon this mixture of signals because it only finds regularities between adjacent sounds. In this view, the auditory environment would be grouped into separate entities by means of readily available acoustic cues such as separation in frequency and location. Regularity extraction processes would then operate upon the resulting groups. Our new experimental evidence challenges this view. We presented two interleaved sound sequences which overlapped in frequency range and shared all acoustic parameters. The sequences only differed in their underlying regular patterns. We inserted deviants into one of the sequences to probe whether the regularity was extracted. In the first experiment, we found that these deviants elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN) component. Thus the auditory system was able to find the regularity between the non-adjacent sounds. Regularity extraction was not influenced by sequence cohesiveness as manipulated by the relative duration of tones and silent inter-tone-intervals. In the second experiment, we showed that a regularity connecting non-adjacent sounds was discovered only when the intervening sequence also contained a regular pattern, but not when the intervening sounds were randomly varying. This suggests that separate regular patterns are available to the auditory system as a cue for identifying signals coming from distinct sound sources. Thus auditory regularity extraction is not necessarily confined to a processing stage after initial sound grouping, but may precede grouping when other acoustic cues are unavailable.