DIAGNOSTICO FINAL DOCUMENTACIÓN SISTEMA DE GESTIÓN INTEGRADO INCIVIL S.A.S

Initially, the same paradigm used in Experiment 1 was to be used to test children in Ex-

periment 2. However, the paradigm used in Experiment 1 proved to be too complex for

children. Thus, some changes to Experiment 1 were made in order to make it more suit-

able for children. The aim of Experiment 2 is the same as in Experiment 1, which is to test

the threshold of generalization for adults.

Experiment 2 tests adult participants. Although adults in Experiment 1 overgener-

alized in both language groups, a potential explanation for this result could be due to a

last-resort strategy stemming from the complexity of the experiment. Experiment 2 was

designed with a simpler task, which allows us to address the question of generalization

with less confounding factors in place.

3.6.4.1. Methods 3.6.4.1.1 Participants

Adult participants were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. Compensation

for participation in the study was in the form of course credit. There were a total of 20

participants; 10 subjects were run in each condition. Each subject was tested individually

with an experimenter present in the room.

3.6.4.1.2 Materials

Several measures were taken to simplify Experiment 2. The artificial language created for

Experiment 1 was reused in Experiment 2; however, one change made to Experiment 2 was

order for intransitive sentences and a Verb-ka-Object word order for transitive sentences. Thus, the artificial language still resembled the causative alternation in natural language,

while also allowing for minimal difference between the two sentence types.

Second, in addition to pictures and recordings, participants were also shown the lan-

guage in written form as additional visual support in Experiment 2. The text was added

in order to facilitate learning of the language by breaking it into its component parts. The

pilot data also confirmed that participants found the task easier when provided with text

that indicated the separate words used in the auditory stimuli. The rest of the stimuli used

were the same as in Experiment 1.

3.6.4.1.3 Procedure

The language groups were the same as in Experiment 1, and the tasks still consisted of

an exposure phase and a testing phase using an elicitation task. However, the duration

of the task was considerably shortened for Experiment 2. During the main task of the

experiment, participants only heard the 112 sentences; they were not exposed to any

individual items, as opposed to in Experiment 1.

Additionally, the training phase in Experiment 1 was eliminated, and replaced by a

noun matching game instead. There were two rounds in the noun matching game. In the

first round, participants see an object in the middle of the screen, and are asked to match

this object with one of two choices at the bottom of the screen. They are asked to repeat

the name of the object shown in each trial. In the second round of the matching game,

there is no object prompt in the middle of the screen. Participants hear the name of an

object, and have to select one of two options on the screen; i.e., the correct object that

matches with the novel word heard in the trial. The matching game was introduced in

order to help participants learn the names of the objects used in the language. The game

was meant to help participants recognize that the sentences used in the exposure phase

previously used training task in order to get participants to learn the new language.

Another change that was introduced is this study is the addition of sticker breaks.

There were 6 sticker breaks randomly interspersed throughout the experiment. The sticker

breaks were included to motivate participants to complete the study, and to give them a

chance to take a break from the tasks in the experiment.

3.6.4.2. Predictions

The predictions of this experiment are the same as in Experiment 1 in Section 3.6.3.2 (cf.

Figures 3.11 and 3.12).

3.6.4.3. Results

The results are presented in Figure 3.14. Just as in Experiment 1, participants in Experi-

ment 2 overgeneralized in both the 8 out of 10 group as well as the 5 out of 10 group. Each

of the 10 participants in both groups produced-kafor each novel verb item tested. There

was no difference between the responses of the participants in the two language groups.

The results of Experiment 2 also indicate that participants are not more likely to as-

sume that the causative marker is ungrammatical for a more frequent verb. As in Experi-

ment 1, Experiment 2 also found no effect of verb frequency.

3.6.4.4. Discussion of the Results

The results suggest that adults, at least in this paradigm, do not follow the Sufficiency Prin-

ciple, nor are they simply probability matching. Instead, they have learned the causative

alternation rule in both the 5 out of 10 and 8 out of 10 groups. The adult responses in-

dicate that even 5 out of 10 verbs following the causative alternation rule were sufficient

for generalization.

There are two potential interpretations of the results from Experiments 1 and 2. The

0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 5 out of 10 8 out of 10 Groups

Rate of −ka Production

Figure 3.14: The results for Experiment 2 show that participants overgeneralized the

causative alternation rule in both the 5 out of 10 and the 8 out of 10 condition. Each

participant used the causative form for each response tested.

participants to overgeneralize. If adults have indeed successfully learned the causative

alternation rule with 50% of the items showing the pattern, then the results are an indi-

cation that adults behave distinctly from the child learner, as predicted by the Sufficiency

Principle.

Moreover, the second prediction of adults probability matching was based on previ-

ous studies that found that adult participants probability match in similar paradigms (e.g.,

Schuler, Yang, and Newport 2016). This pattern was not found in this study. The fact that

different results were found in this study as opposed to previous studies testing the Tol-

erance Principle leads us to probe deeper into the aspects of the studies that differed. For

instance, Schuler et al. 2016 test positive exceptions in the experiments reported therein;

iments presented here, negative exceptions are tested; participants do not hear whether

an item is an exception to the rule. Therefore, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest

that adults may treat negative and positive exceptions to the rule differently.

Finally, the results also show that no effects of entrenchment were found. The most

frequent pure intransitive verb occurred 20 times in the 8 out of 10 condition. The low

frequency intransitive verb occurred only 4 times in the exposure phase. The results show

that participants were not more likely to causativize the low frequency intransitive verb

as opposed to the high frequency verb.