abstractLiteracy affects many aspects of language and cognition, including the shift from a more holistic mode of processing to a more analytical part-based mode of processing. Here we examined whether this shift impacts the ability of preschool and primary school children to learn the rules underlying a finite-state grammar using an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm implemented with either linguistic (letters) or non-linguistic (colors) materials to further examine if children’s AGL performance was modulated by type of stimuli. Both tasks involved a training phase in which half of the preschool children and half of the primary school children were exposed to a set of either letter or color strings without any information about the rules underlying the construction of those strings. Later, in the test phase, they were asked to decide whether a new set of letter or color strings conformed to those rules to test grammar learning. Results showed that only primary school children showed evidence of learning, and, importantly, only with colors. These findings seem to support the view that learning to read promotes reliance on smaller linguistic units that might hinder the ability of first-graders to learn the rules underlying finite-state grammars implemented with linguistic materials.

中文翻译：

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字母和颜色对人工语法学习 (AGL) 的读写影响：来自学龄前和小学生的证据

摘要读写能力影响语言和认知的许多方面，包括从更全面的处理模式转变为更具分析性的基于部分的处理模式。在这里，我们检查了这种转变是否会影响学龄前儿童和小学生使用人工语法学习 (AGL) 范式学习有限状态语法的能力，该范式使用语言（字母）或非语言（颜色）材料来实现进一步检查儿童的 AGL 表现是否受到刺激类型的调节。这两项任务都涉及一个训练阶段，其中一半的学龄前儿童和一半的小学生接触一组字母或颜色字符串，而没有任何关于这些字符串构造规则的信息。后来在测试阶段，他们被要求决定一组新的字母或颜色字符串是否符合这些规则来测试语法学习。结果表明，只有小学生有学习的迹象，而且重要的是，只有颜色。这些发现似乎支持这样一种观点，即学习阅读会促进对较小语言单位的依赖，这可能会阻碍一年级学生学习使用语言材料实现的有限状态语法的基础规则的能力。