Publications [#351875] of Michael Tomasello

Journal Articles

1. Ambridge, B; Theakston, AL; Lieven, EVM; Tomasello, M, The distributed learning effect for children's acquisition of an abstract syntactic construction, Cognitive Development, vol. 21 no. 2 (April, 2006), pp. 174-193 [doi]
   (last updated on 2025/06/15)

   Abstract:
   In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this distributed learning effect with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children aged 3;6-5;10 (Experiment 1) and 72 children aged 4;0-5;0 (Experiment 2) were given 10 exposures to the construction all in one session (massed), or on a schedule of two trials per day for 5 days (distributed-pairs), or one trial per day for 10 days (distributed). Children in both the distributed-pairs and distributed conditions learnt the construction better than children in the massed condition, as evidenced by productive use of this construction with a verb that had not been presented during training. Methodological and theoretical implications of this finding are discussed, with particular reference to single-process accounts of language acquisition. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.