Enhancing second language learning through orthographical changes

Adults face many challenges in acquiring a second language, some of which have been attributed to learning from more segmented linguistic units compared to children. Children draw on both single words and multiword units (crossing lexical boundaries) in language learning, with multiword units used to learn about grammatical relations between words. Adults are less likely to learn from multiword units, because of their existing knowledge of words. Indeed, when adults are encouraged to rely on multiword units, by manipulating the auditory input they hear, they show better learning of grammatical relations. Here, we investigate a novel way to increase adults’ reliance on multiword units: we show that orthographic changes can encourage reliance on larger units and facilitate learning of grammatical relations in both adults and children learning Greek. In Study 1, we find that adults learn article-noun gender agreement better when the article-noun sequence is written as a single unsegmented word compared to two separate words. In Study 2, we replicated these findings, again showing that learning article-noun agreement from multiword units enhances performance for article-noun agreement, but does improve generalization of the learned grammatical classes to noun-adjective agreement. In Study 3, we find that children (ages 7–11) also show better learning of article-noun agreement when exposed to unsegmented text. These findings provide further support for the benefit of learning grammatical relations from multiword units in both children and adults and point to new ways of enhancing second language instruction.