Consistent and cumulative effects of syntactic experience in children’s sentence production: Evidence for error-based implicit learning

•Our study supports an error-based syntactic learning mechanism in children and adults.•Participants heard equal numbers of actives/passives in two sessions a week apart.•3–4-year-olds showed both immediate priming and learning across sessions for passives.•Individual children’s susceptibility to priming was consistent across sessions.•Adults showed (individually consistent) immediate priming but no cumulative learning. Error-based implicit learning models (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) propose that a single learning mechanism underlies immediate and long-term effects of experience on children’s syntax. We test two key predictions of these models: That individual experiences of infrequent structures should yield both immediate and long-term facilitation, and that such learning should be consistent in individual speakers across time. Children (and adults) described transitive events in two picture-matching games, held a week apart. In both sessions, the experimenter’s immediately preceding syntax (active vs. passive) dynamically influenced children’s (and adults’) syntactic choices in an individually consistent manner. Moreover, children showed long-term facilitation, through an increased likelihood to produce passives in Session 2, with speakers who were most likely to immediately repeat passives in Session 1 being most likely to produce passives in Session 2. Our results are consistent with an error-based syntactic learning mechanism that operates across the lifespan.