Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language is acquired within a complex, interactiveenvironment. A key question for cognitive science is whetherand how different types of environmental cues might affectthe learning and processing of language. In this paper, weexplore the role of feedback as a possible cue in a novelactive artificial language learning task: The Picture GuessingGame. Subjects were instructed to guess which scenecorrectly displayed the meaning of a spoken sequence ofunfamiliar monosyllabic words. After their response, eitherpositive, negative, or no feedback was provided. Theprediction was that feedback would help the subject toeventually learn the vocabulary, syntax, and semantics of theartificial language. The results indeed showed that feedback(both positive and negative) is beneficial and necessary toattain a certain level of learning. Interestingly, the datashowed that positive feedback may be particularly helpful forthe learner, promoting more in-depth learning of the artificiallanguage.