Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research on acquisition of noun class systems, such as grammatical gender, has shown that child learners rely dispro- portionately on phonological cues to class, even when compet- ing semantic cues are more reliable. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that over-reliance on phonology may be due to the fact that phonological cues are available first; learners base early representations on surface phonological dependen- cies, only later integrating semantic cues from noun meanings. Here, we show that child learners (6-7 year-olds) show this same sensitivity to early availability. However, we also find intriguing evidence of developmental changes in sensitivity to semantics; when both cues are simultaneously available chil- dren are more likely to rely on a phonology cue than adults. Our results suggest that early availability and a bias in favor of phonological cues may both contribute to children’s over- reliance on phonology in natural language acquisition.