Blocking and Learned Attention in Language Acquisition

Adult language acquisition typically falls far short of nativelike competence. Various explanations have been proposed for this limited attainment of adults compared to children, including critical periods for language acquisition, sociocultural differences, motivational differences, and restricted input. This paper considers an alternative explanation in terms of the associative learning phenomenon of the attentional blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones. It illustrates this phenomenon in investigations of learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in a small subset of Latin under experimental conditions. Within the experiment, early experience of adverbial cues blocked the acquisition of verbal tense morphology, and, contrariwise, early experience of tense blocked later learning of adverbs. There were also long-term language transfer effects: first language speakers of Chinese languages, which do not exhibit verb tense morphology, failed to acquire inflectional cues when adverbial and verbal cues were equally available.