Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment: Evidence from artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children.
Anna Samara, Elizabeth Wonnacott, Gaurav Saxena, Ramya Maitreyee, Judit Fazekas, Ben Ambridge · Psychological Review · 2024
) via either preemption only or entrenchment only. Across all five studies, participants in the preemption condition (as per our preregistered prediction) rated unattested verb/noun + particle combinations as less acceptable for restricted verbs/nouns, which appeared during training, than for unrestricted, novel-at-test verbs/nouns, which did not appear during training, that is, strong evidence for preemption. Participants in the entrenchment condition showed no evidence for such an effect (and in 3/5 experiments, positive evidence for the null). We conclude that a successful model of learning linguistic restrictions must instantiate competition between different forms only where they express the same (or similar) meanings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).