Language acquisition and language processing: Finding new connections

Abstract

Two central questions addressed in psycholinguistics pertain to acquisition and process. First, how do children, exposed to a relatively small sample of language use in context, come to acquire a complete linguistic system that can express an almost limitless number of ideas? Second, how do adults access this acquired linguistic knowledge in such an expert manner that they achieve interpretation in real time as the signal unfolds, typically making distinctions on a millisecond timescale? Traditionally these two questions have been addressed separately, with the field taking a divide and conquer approach, often with great success. However, over the past three decades, the distinction between these questions, and their artificial divide in the discipline, have been blurred. Children as young as 24 months have been observed to interpret speech in real time, deploying their albeit incomplete linguistic knowledge almost as quickly as their adult expert counterparts (e.g., de Carvalho et al. 2016; Choi & Trueswell 2010, Lidz et al. 2017, Trueswell & Gleitman 2007). Likewise, adults have been observed to be highly adaptive, learning new patterns of speech, new terms, and new syntax from brief exposures (e.g., Caplan et al. 2021, Fine & Jaeger 2013, Norris et al. 2003, Samuel & Kraljic 2009, Wonnacott et al. 2008). In addition, developmental differences have begun to be uncovered in both language processing (e.g., children’s failure to revise real-time interpretations; Atkinson et al. 2018, Trueswell et al. 1999, Huang & Hollister 2019, Woodard et al. 2016, Weighall 2008) and in learning (e.g., of statistical regularities and rules; Hudson Kam & Newport 2005, Hudson Kam & Chang 2009, Newport 2020). This bridging territory, between processing and acquisition, is fertile ground not only for new research but for new research questions; one must ask how various processing and learning observations of the last three decades coalesce into a more unified theory of language use over the lifetime, and how language learning at any age is shaped by processing considerations. For example, what role does real-time predictive processing play in the acquisition of vocabulary and syntax? Are learning procedures that are designed to facilitate processing the same or different from those designed to acquire linguistic knowledge more generally? This issue of Language Acquisition is the product of a special theme of the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, entitled Language Acquisition and Language Processing: Finding New Connections. That session, and this volume, aimed to bring together researchers investigating the mechanisms of language acquisition and process, seeking further cross-pollination with adult psycholinguistic research. To be clear, it is not the case that the divide and conquer approach prevalent in the subfields of language acquisition and process is ready to be abandoned completely. However, dialogue between these subfields is increasing to the point that an important theoretical unification is in sight. By bringing together eminent acquisition and processing researchers, we may begin to better understand how the real-time processing of linguistic input (and the ambient referent world) is connected to acquisition, and how the acquisition process itself might be integrated into theories of language processing. The following is a summary of the articles that appear in this volume, all of which pertain to these issues. As the reader will see, there are emerging themes pertaining to the extent to which there are