What do animals learn in artificial grammar studies?
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Berwick_What do animals.pdf
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Author(s)
Beckers, Gabriël J.L.
Okanoya, Kazuo
Bolhuis, Johan J.
Berwick, Robert C
Date Issued
July 18, 2017
Journal
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Beckers, Gabriël J.L., Robert C. Berwick, Kazuo Okanoya, and Johan J. Bolhuis. “What Do Animals Learn in Artificial Grammar Studies?” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (December 2016).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Artificial grammar learning is a popular paradigm to study syntactic ability in nonhuman animals. Subjects are first trained to recognize strings of tokens that are sequenced according to grammatical rules. Next, to test if recognition depends on grammaticality, subjects are presented with grammar-consistent and grammar-violating test strings, which they should discriminate between. However, simpler cues may underlie discrimination if they are available. Here, we review stimulus design in a sample of studies that use particular sounds as tokens, and that claim or suggest their results demonstrate a form of sequence rule learning. To assess the extent of acoustic similarity between training and test strings, we use four simple measures corresponding to cues that are likely salient. All stimulus sets contain biases in similarity measures such that grammatical test stimuli resemble training stimuli acoustically more than do non- grammatical test stimuli. These biases may contribute to response behaviour, reducing the strength of grammatical explanations. We conclude that acoustic confounds are a blind spot in artificial grammar learning studies in nonhuman animals.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.12.021
