Short-Term Grammatical Plasticity in Adult Language Learners

This overview describes recent work on certain electrophysiological correlates of grammar learning in adults. Electrophysiology is potentially useful for sentence processing research related to learning not only because it has the temporal resolution to observe event-related potential (ERP) responses to individual words as they appear within a sentence or a phrase but also for the behavioral classification occurring on the same trials. A classroom-based longitudinal approach, well known from earlier research, is first described, in which a magnetoelectroencephalogram (MEG) is recorded periodically while students acquire knowledge from a course outside the laboratory. A short-term learning design is also described, in which learners classify phrases while an electroencephalogram (EEG) is recorded. The main observation of this work is that short-term changes in several ERP components can be seen in adult learners using conventional EEG or MEG recordings and that these short-term changes are potentially diagnostic of learning mechanisms. The results, although preliminary in many respects, suggest that a productive direction for future research might be to examine the dynamics of electrophysiological responses and behavior at multiple time scales during grammar learning.