Journal of experimental child psychology
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J Exp Child Psychol · Jan 2019
Early developing syntactic knowledge influences sequential statistical learning in infancy.
Adults' linguistic background influences their sequential statistical learning of an artificial language characterized by conflicting forward-going and backward-going transitional probabilities. English-speaking adults favor backward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with the head-initial structure of English. Korean-speaking adults favor forward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with the head-final structure of Korean. ⋯ By 13 months, however, English-learning infants favored backward-going transitional probabilities over forward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with English-speaking adults. This indicates that statistical learning rapidly adapts to the predominant syntactic structure of the native language. Such adaptation may facilitate subsequent learning by highlighting statistical structures that are likely to be informative in the native linguistic environment.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Jan 2019
Inhibition of the whole number bias in decimal number comparison: A developmental negative priming study.
A major source of errors in decimal magnitude comparison tasks is the inappropriate application of whole number rules. Specifically, when comparing the magnitude of decimal numbers and the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.9 vs. 0.476), using a property of whole numbers such as "the greater the number of digits, the greater its magnitude" may lead to erroneous answers. ⋯ We found that after participants needed to compare decimal numbers in which the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.9 vs. 0.476), they were less efficient at comparing decimal numbers in which the largest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.826 vs. 0.3) than they were after comparing decimal numbers with the same number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.981 vs. 0.444). The negative priming effects reported in seventh graders and adults suggest that inhibitory control is needed at all ages to avoid errors when comparing decimals where the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point.