Date of Award

Fall 2026

Abstract

Introduction: Our brains are wired to identify patterns. This ability allowed humans to develop complex systems of language, and it is these same skills that allow infants and children to implicitly acquire the rules and structures that govern our languages. Implicit statistical learning (ISL) is thought to be responsible for the subconscious acquisition of language-related skills. ISL is increasingly being investigated as a treatment mechanism for those with acquired language disorders such as aphasia via syntactic priming. An important caveat to learning is the distinction between task mastery and true skill learning. We propose an intermediary between these two conditions: inflexible partial-skill learning. This describes apparent task mastery in the absence of generalization, a requirement of true learning.

Current study: Participants completed an implicit priming task consisting of an exposure phase and test phase. This study investigates what happens when inflexible partial-skill learning is promoted with an invariable exposure phase consisting of only double-object dative models. Test phases varied by group assignment. Participants were assigned to either a blocked or variable group. Participants in the blocked test phase heard 12 filler trials followed by 12 prepositional dative models. Participants in the variable test phase heard the same 12 filler trials and prepositional dative models, but in a pseudo-randomized order. We investigated if priming (i.e., repetition of a modeled syntactic structure) during the exposure phase, cognitive flexibility, production variability (i.e., syntactic flexibility or switches), or group assignment predicted syntactic perseveration (i.e., use of the previously modeled syntactic structure in the test phase).

Results: Beta-binomial regression revealed significant main effects of priming affinity (p=0.021), switches (p<0.001), and cognitive flexibility (p=0.005). A significant two-way interaction was found between priming and cognitive flexibility (p=0.002). At high levels of priming, poor cognitive flexibility predicted increased syntactic perseveration.

Conclusions: Consideration of input variability is essential for development of efficacious implicit syntactic priming treatment paradigms. Cognitive flexibility should be evaluated in populations where implicit syntactic priming is utilized as a treatment mechanism. These results have implications for both clinical practice and implicit learning theory related to language and domain-general cognitive function.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

First Advisor

Amy E Ramage

Second Advisor

Kathryn J Greenslade

Third Advisor

Casey Roark

Department or Program

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Degree Name

Master of Science

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