Zen in the art of language acquisition: Statistical learning and the Less is More hypothesis

It seems an obvious truth that children are better language learners than adults. Children seem able to master a second language with ease, while adults are rarely successful at second language acquisition. Newport's (1990) Less is More hypothesis represented an attempt to explain these observations by invoking general cognitive mechanisms. This hypothesis takes as its starting point the observation that children exhibit reduced working memory capacity relative to adults and suggests that this reduction serves as a filter to aid children in deducing the structure of the language they are learning. We present two experiments testing a specific prediction that follows from the Less is More hypothesis, namely that adults will perform better on language learning tasks if their available working memory capacity is reduced. The experiments examined the learning of word boundaries and syntactic agreement, each with and without a concurrent cognitive load. The results of these experiments were contrary to the Less is More prediction, suggesting that other explanations must be found for the observed superior language learning performance of children over adults.