Age is a decisive factor in language acquisition. While children have a very high chance to become native or native-like in a new language, that is rarely the case for adults. I examined whether the fact that most adults are literate, while most children are not, may play a role in this effect. I studied illiterate adults (Havron & Arnon, 2017a), first grade children before and after they learned to read (Havron & Arnon, 2017a; Havron, Raviv & Arnon, 2018, Havron & Arnon, 2021). I found an effect of literacy on language processing, such that literates are more likely to processing language as made up of word units. Processing language as a string of words glued together by rules makes learning some aspects of language harder (e.g., grammatical agreement), and some aspects easier (e.g., vocabulary). Agreement errors are one of the hallmarks of none-native speakers.

Joint work of Dr. Naomi Havron, Dr. Inbal Arnon (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

Related publications:

Havron, N., & Arnon, I. (2020, April 18). Starting Big: The Effect of Unit Size on Language Learning in Children and Adults. View

Havron, N., Raviv, L. & Arnon, I. Literate and preliterate children show different learning patterns in an artificial language learning task. J Cult Cogn Sci 2, 21–33 (2018). View

Havron, N., & Arnon, I. (2017). Minding the gaps: literacy enhances lexical segmentation in children learning to read. Journal of Child Language, 44(6), 1516-1538.‏ View

Havron, N., & Arnon, I. (2017). Reading between the words: The effect of literacy on second language lexical segmentation. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(1), 127-153.‏ View