The Facilitative Cues in Learning Complex Recursive Structures 名古屋大学国際言語文化研究科日本言語文化専攻第34回日本語教育学講座講演会 The Facilitative Cues in Learning Complex Recursive Structures 講演者： Dr. Jun Lai （オランダのTilburg University ・ポスドク研究員） The learnability of center-embedded recursion has been proposed to be crucial in distinguishing humans from non-humans (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002; Fitch & Hauser, 2004). It has played an important role in both psycholinguistic empirical researches about language acquisition, and also theoretical debates from philosophy, biology and computer science about learning complex structures. Previous studies have shown that the center-embedded recursion is notoriously difficult to process (Lai & Poletiek, 2010, 2011, 2013). The purpose of the current project is to investigate the influence of statistical information, i.e. the sample set and its probability, on mastering the complex recursive structures. In an experiment with artificial grammar learning paradigm, we presented our adult participants with a certain number of non-sense artificial strings, which were composed according to an underlying center-embedded recursive rule. After the learning phase, participants were presented with novel strings composed according to the same rule. Participants were required to perform a grammaticality-judgment task. We manipulated different aspects of statistical information of the learning input, in order to investigate the influence in participants’ processing of center-embedded structure. The results showed that participants were significantly assisted by the statistical cues of the learning input. In addition, the working memory capacity participants significantly correlated with their language learning performance. 日程: 2013年12月17日(火曜日) 午後6時15分～午後7時45分(6コマ目の授業時間帯） 場所: 名古屋大学全学教育棟・北棟405号室 ＜参加自由・無料＞ 連絡先：名古屋大学 玉岡賀津雄（たまおか かつお） ktamaoka@lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp