Psychology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Department of Cognitive Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
Dev Sci. 2018 Jul;21(4):e12593. doi: 10.1111/desc.12593. Epub 2017 Sep 12.
Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks and across modalities (e.g., auditory, visual), raising questions on the domain generality of SL. However, while SL is well established for infants and adults, only little is known about its developmental trajectory during childhood, leaving two important questions unanswered: (1) Is SL an early-maturing capacity that is fully developed in infancy, or does it improve with age like other cognitive capacities (e.g., memory)? and (2) Will SL have similar developmental trajectories across modalities? Only few studies have looked at SL across development, with conflicting results: some find age-related improvements while others do not. Importantly, no study to date has examined auditory SL across childhood, nor compared it to visual SL to see if there are modality-based differences in the developmental trajectory of SL abilities. We addressed these issues by conducting a large-scale study of children's performance on matching auditory and visual SL tasks across a wide age range (5-12y). Results show modality-based differences in the development of SL abilities: while children's learning in the visual domain improved with age, learning in the auditory domain did not change in the tested age range. We examine these findings in light of previous studies and discuss their implications for modality-based differences in SL and for the role of auditory SL in language acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kg35hoF0pw.
婴儿、儿童和成人都能够通过统计学习（SL）从环境中提取重复模式，这是一种被认为在语言习得中具有重要作用的内隐学习机制。过去 20 年的研究表明，SL 存在于婴儿早期，并在各种任务和模态中发现（例如，听觉、视觉），这引发了关于 SL 领域普遍性的问题。然而，虽然 SL 在婴儿和成人中得到了很好的证实，但对于其在儿童期的发展轨迹却知之甚少，这留下了两个重要的问题尚未回答：（1）SL 是一种成熟较早的能力，在婴儿期就已完全发展，还是像其他认知能力（例如记忆）一样随着年龄的增长而提高？（2）SL 是否会在不同模态中具有相似的发展轨迹？只有少数研究在整个发展过程中研究了 SL，结果存在冲突：有些研究发现与年龄相关的提高，而有些则没有。重要的是，迄今为止，没有研究在整个儿童期考察听觉 SL，也没有将其与视觉 SL 进行比较，以了解 SL 能力的发展轨迹是否存在基于模态的差异。我们通过对儿童在广泛年龄范围内（5-12 岁）在匹配听觉和视觉 SL 任务上的表现进行大规模研究来解决这些问题。结果表明，SL 能力的发展存在基于模态的差异：虽然儿童在视觉领域的学习随着年龄的增长而提高，但在测试的年龄范围内，听觉领域的学习并没有改变。我们根据之前的研究来探讨这些发现，并讨论其对 SL 基于模态的差异以及听觉 SL 在语言习得中的作用的影响。本文的视频摘要可以在以下网址观看：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kg35hoF0pw。
