Regularization behavior in a non-linguistic domain

Language learners tend to regularize unpredictable variation and some claim that is due to a language-specific regularization bias. We investigate the role of task difficulty on regularization behavior in a non-linguistic frequency learning task and show that adults regularize variable input when tracking multiple frequencies concurrently, but reliably reproduce the variation they have observed when tracking one frequency. These results suggest that regularization behavior may be due to domain-general factors, such as memory limitations.

ISBN:978-0-9768318-9-1

Publication year:2013

Accessibility:Open