Discriminative theories frame language learning as a process of reducing uncertainty about the meaning of an utterance by discriminating informative from uninformative cues via the mechanisms of prediction error and cue competition. Previous work showed that discriminative learning is affected by the order in which information is presented during language learning. Specifically, learning suffixes, where complex stems precede affixes, promotes better generalization than prefixing, which tends to promote better item-learning instead. We explored this in two large-scale web-based artificial language learning experiments with adult learners (total N = 434), as well as two computational simulations implementing a discriminative learning model. While we did not find an overall benefit of suffixing over prefixing in generalization, consistent with our theoretical and computational predictions, we found that participants in the prefix condition were unable to discriminate between frequent, but uninformative cues and low-frequency, informative cues. This resulted in them being more likely to show incorrect overgeneralization of that feature for low frequency test items than participants in the suffix condition. We did not find a benefit of prefixing in item learning (although there was overall better item-learning of low type-frequency items), which we discuss in terms of the methodological limitations of our empirical paradigm. Taken together, these results underline the crucial role prediction error plays in learning linguistic generalization, and have implications for how generalization interacts with item-learning.

判别理论将语言学习构想为通过预测错误和提示竞争机制，通过区分信息性提示和非信息性提示来减少话语含义不确定性的过程。先前的工作表明，在语言学习过程中，区分性学习受到信息呈现顺序的影响。具体来说，学习后缀，其中复杂词干先于词缀，比前缀可以促进更好的泛化，而前缀往往可以促进更好的项学习。我们在两个针对成人学习者的基于网络的大型人工语言学习实验（总N = 434）中进行了探索，并在两个实现区分学习模型的计算模拟中对此进行了探讨。虽然我们没有发现后缀比前缀大体上具有整体优势，但与我们的理论和计算预测相一致，但我们发现，前缀条件下的参与者无法区分频繁但无信息的提示和低频信息提示。这导致他们比后缀条件下的参与者更有可能对低频测试项目显示该功能的不正确的泛化。我们没有发现在项目学习中加前缀的好处（尽管总体上更好地学习了低频率的项目），这是根据经验范式的方法学局限性进行讨论的。综上所述，这些结果突显了预测错误在学习语言泛化中所起的关键作用，并且对泛化与项学习的交互方式具有影响。