Learning language requires acquiring the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives and case markers following syntactic rules. We also measured individual differences in declarative and procedural memory processing, which have been linked to vocabulary and grammar learning, respectively. The results showed that grammar and vocabulary can be acquired simultaneously, but with distinctive patterns of acquisition – the syntactic role of verbs and their referents first, then other lexical categories, and finally the syntactic function of case markers. Interdependencies in learning were found for word order and verbs, which related to verbal declarative memory, and also for nouns, adjectives and case markers, which related to procedural memory.

中文翻译：

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词汇和语法习得的区别：个体差异方法

学习语言需要掌握语言中单词的语法类别，但学习这些类别需要了解单词在句法中的作用。在这项研究中，我们研究了学习由名词、动词、形容词和大小写标记组成的人工语言的学习者如何按照句法规则解决这个鸡和蛋问题。我们还测量了陈述性和程序性记忆处理的个体差异，这分别与词汇和语法学习有关。结果表明，语法和词汇可以同时习得，但习得模式不同——首先是动词及其所指对象的句法作用，然后是其他词汇类别，最后是格标记的句法功能。在学习中发现了词序和动词的相互依赖性，