From a theoretical perspective, most discussions of statistical learning have focused on the possible “statistical” properties that are the object of learning. Much less attention has been given to defining what “learning” is in the context of “statistical learning.” One major difficulty is that SL research has been monitoring participants’ performance in laboratory settings with a strikingly narrow set of tasks, where learning is typically assessed offline, through a set of two-alternative-forced-choice questions, which follow a brief visual or auditory familiarization (...) stream. Is that all there is to characterizing SL abilities? Here we adopt a novel perspective for investigating the processing of regularities in the visual modality. By tracking online performance in a self-paced SL paradigm, we focus on the trajectory of learning. In a set of three experiments we show that this paradigm provides a reliable and valid signature of SL performance, and it offers important insights for understanding how statistical regularities are perceived and assimilated in the visual modality. This demonstrates the promise of integrating different operational measures to our theory of SL. (shrink)

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood to see whether it is fully developed in infancy or improves with age, like many other cognitive abilities. A recent study showed modality‐based differences in the effect of age (...) during childhood: While visual SL improved with age, auditory SL did not. This finding was taken as evidence for modality‐based differences in SL. However, since that study used auditory linguistic stimuli (syllables), the differential effect of age may have been driven by stimulus type (linguistic vs. non‐linguistic) rather than modality. Here, we ask whether age will affect performance similarly in the two modalities when non‐linguistic auditory stimuli are used (familiar sounds instead of syllables). We conduct a large‐scale study of children's performance on visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL during childhood (ages 5–12 years). The results show a similar effect of age in both modalities: Unlike previous findings, both visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL improved with age. These findings highlight the stimuli‐sensitive nature of SL and suggest that modality‐based differences may be stimuli‐dependent, and that age‐invariance may be limited to linguistic stimuli. (shrink)

There is little empirical evidence showing a direct link between a capacity for statistical learning (SL) and proficiency with natural language. Moreover, discussion of the role of SL in language acquisition has seldom focused on literacy development. Our study addressed these issues by investigating the relationship between SL and reading ability in typically developing children and healthy adults. We tested SL using visually presented stimuli within a triplet learning paradigm and examined reading ability by administering the Wide Range Achievement Test (...) (WRAT-4; Wilkinson & Robertson, 2006). A total of 38 typically developing children (mean age of 9;5 years, range 6;4–12;5) and 37 healthy adults (mean age of 21 years, range 18–34) were assessed. In children, SL was significantly related to reading ability. Importantly, this relationship was independent of grade and also age. The adult data, too, revealed that SL was significantly related to reading ability. A regression analysis of the combined child and adult data revealed that SL accounted for a unique amount of variance in reading ability, after age and attention had been taken into consideration. For the first time, this study provides empirical evidence that a capacity for more effective SL is related to higher reading ability in the general population. (shrink)

Running head: Implicit sequence learning ABSTRACT Can we learn without awareness? Although this issue has been extensively explored through studies of implicit learning, there is currently no agreement about the extent to which knowledge can be acquired and projected onto performance in an unconscious way. The controversy, like that surrounding implicit memory, seems to be at least in part attributable to unquestioned acceptance of the unrealistic assumption that tasks are process-pure, that is, that a given task exclusively involves either implicit (...) or explicit knowledge. (shrink)