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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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Investigated inflectional morphology acquisition across Polish, Finnish and Estonian. • Preregistered analyses found effects of frequency and phonological analogy. • Observed both crosslinguistic similarities and language-specific effects. • Evidence for analogy-based connectionist and exemplar accounts. The aim of this large-scale, preregistered, cross-linguistic study was to mediate between theories of the acquisition of inflectional morphology, which lie along a continuum from rule-based to analogy-based. Across three morphologically rich languages (Polish, Finnish and Estonian), 120 children (mean age 48.32 months, SD = 7.0 months) completed an experimental, elicited-production study of noun case marking. Confirmatory analyses found effects of surface-form (whole-word, token) frequency for Polish and Estonian, and phonological neighbourhood density (PND) for all three languages (using either our preregistered class-based or an exploratory form-based measure). An exploratory all-languages analysis yielded both main effects, and a predicted interaction, such that the effect of PND was greater for forms with lower surface-form frequency, which are less available for direct retrieval from memory. Cross-linguistic differences were investigated with exploratory analyses of case variance, affix syncretism and stem changes. We conclude that these findings are difficult to reconcile with accounts that posit rules or linguistic abstractions and are most naturally explained by analogy-based connectionist or exemplar accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]