Lyon Neuroscience Research Center Team Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics CNRS UMR5292, INSERM U1028, Université Claude Bernard-Lyon I, 50 Av. Tony Garnier, 69366, Lyon Cedex 07, France.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2013 Feb;20(1):142-7. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0309-8.
Humans have remarkable statistical learning abilities for verbal speech-like materials and for nonverbal music-like materials. Statistical learning has been shown with artificial languages (AL) that consist of the concatenation of nonsense word-like units into a continuous stream. These ALs contain no cues to unit boundaries other than the transitional probabilities between events, which are high within a unit and low between units. Most AL studies have used units of regular lengths. In the present study, the ALs were based on the same statistical structures but differed in unit length regularity (i.e., whether they were made out of units of regular vs. irregular lengths) and in materials (i.e., syllables vs. musical timbres), to allow us to investigate the influence of unit length regularity on domain-general statistical learning. In addition to better performance for verbal than for nonverbal materials, the findings revealed an effect of unit length regularity, with better performance for languages with regular- (vs. irregular-) length units. This unit length regularity effect suggests the influence of dynamic attentional processes (as proposed by the dynamic attending theory; Large & Jones (Psychological Review 106: 119-159, 1999)) on domain-general statistical learning.
人类在语言类材料（如口头言语）和音乐类材料（如非言语音乐）的统计学习方面具有显著的能力。在由无意义的单词类单元连续组成的人工语言（AL）中，已经证明了统计学习的存在。这些 AL 除了事件之间的转移概率外，没有其他单元边界的提示，而这些转移概率在一个单元内是高的，在单元之间是低的。大多数 AL 研究都使用固定长度的单元。在本研究中，AL 基于相同的统计结构，但在单元长度规则性（即它们是由规则长度还是不规则长度的单元组成）和材料（即音节与音乐音色）方面有所不同，以允许我们研究单元长度规则性对领域通用统计学习的影响。除了口头材料的表现优于非言语材料外，研究结果还揭示了单元长度规则性的影响，具有规则长度（与不规则长度相比）单元的语言表现更好。这种单元长度规则性效应表明了动态注意过程的影响（如动态注意理论所提出的；Large & Jones (Psychological Review 106: 119-159, 1999))对领域通用统计学习的影响。
