The learnability of center-embedded recursive structures has
attracted much attention (Corballis, 2007; Friederici, 2004;
Rey, Perruchet, & Fagot, 2012). However, most of the
previous studies adopted the artificial grammar learning
paradigm (Reber, 1967) and did not apply natural language
stimuli. Rather, they applied synthetic meaningless training
materials, which hardly represent the richness and complexity
of natural language. Accordingly, in the current study, we
attempt to tighten the link between artificial language learning
and natural language acquisition in the auditory modality, by
enriching our learning environment with phonological cues
that occur in natural, spoken information; in particular,
Chinese tones. In a grammaticality judgment task, we
examined the syntactical processing by participants from
different language backgrounds. Through the cross-language
comparison between Chinese and Dutch native speakers, we
aim to test the influence of language-specific phonological
cues on processing complex linguistic structures. The results
showed that tones had a more beneficial learning effect for
Chinese than for Dutch participants. In other words, when
participants learned a new language, they were likely to bring
their own language routines implicitly from the familiar
native language into processing the unfamiliar one.