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Abstract
The extraction of general knowledge from individual episodes is critical if we are
to learn new knowledge or abilities. Here we uncover some of the key cognitive mechanisms
that characterise this process in the domain of language learning. In five experiments
adult participants learned new morphological units embedded in fictitious words created
by attaching new affixes (e.g., -afe) to familiar word stems (e.g., "sleepafe is a
participant in a study about the effects of sleep"). Participants' ability to generalise
semantic knowledge about the affixes was tested using tasks requiring the comprehension
and production of novel words containing a trained affix (e.g., sailafe). We manipulated
the delay between training and test (Experiment 1), the number of unique exemplars
provided for each affix during training (Experiment 2), and the consistency of the
form-to-meaning mapping of the affixes (Experiments 3-5). In a task where speeded
online language processing is required (semantic priming), generalisation was achieved
only after a memory consolidation opportunity following training, and only if the
training included a sufficient number of unique exemplars. Semantic inconsistency
disrupted speeded generalisation unless consolidation was allowed to operate on one
of the two affix-meanings before introducing inconsistencies. In contrast, in tasks
that required slow, deliberate reasoning, generalisation could be achieved largely
irrespective of the above constraints. These findings point to two different mechanisms
of generalisation that have different cognitive demands and rely on different types
of memory representations.