Literacy affects many aspects of language and cognition, including the shift from a more holistic mode of processing to a more analytical part-based mode of processing. Here we examined whether this shift impacts the ability of preschool and primary school children to learn the rules underlying a finite-state grammar using an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm implemented with either linguistic (letters) or non-linguistic (colors) materials to further examine if children’s AGL performance was modulated by type of stimuli. Both tasks involved a training phase in which half of the preschool children and half of the primary school children were exposed to a set of either letter or color strings without any information about the rules underlying the construction of those strings. Later, in the test phase, they were asked to decide whether a new set of letter or color strings conformed to those rules to test grammar learning. Results showed that only primary school children showed evidence of learning, and, importantly, only with colors. These findings seem to support the view that learning to read promotes reliance on smaller linguistic units that might hinder the ability of first-graders to learn the rules underlying finite-state grammars implemented with linguistic materials.

Reading is one of the most important milestones a child achieves throughout development. Above the letter level, the syllable has been shown to play a relevant role at early stages of visual word recognition in adult skilled readers. However, studies aiming to examine when, during reading acquisition, the syllable emerges as a functional sublexical unit are scarce, and the studies conducted so far have led to inconsistent results. In this work, beginning and intermediate European-Portuguese (EP) developing readers performed a sandwich masked lexical decision task in which CV (e.g., RU.MOR[rumour]) and CVC (e.g., CIS.NE[swan]) first-syllable EP words were preceded either by syllable congruent (e.g., rum.ba-RU.MOR, cis.ra-CIS.NE), syllable incongruent (e.g., rum.ba-RU.MOR, ci.ser-CIS.NE), unrelated (e.g., va.cra-RU.MOR, zar.vo-CIS.NE) pseudowords primes, or identity (e.g., ru.mour-RU.MOUR, cis.ne-CIS.NE) primes. Results showed reliable syllable effects only for intermediate readers and for CV and CVC words alike. Findings are discussed attending to current models of visual word recognition.