Department of Psychology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
Behav Res Methods. 2020 Feb;52(1):68-81. doi: 10.3758/s13428-019-01205-5.
Do commonly used statistical-learning tasks capture stable individual differences in children? Infants, children, and adults are capable of using statistical learning (SL) to extract information about their environment. Although most studies have looked at group-level performance, a growing literature examines individual differences in SL and their relation to language-learning outcomes: Individuals who are better at SL are expected to show better linguistic abilities. Accordingly, studies have shown positive correlations between SL performance and language outcomes in both children and adults. However, these studies have often used tasks designed to explore group-level performance without modifying them, resulting in psychometric shortcomings that impact reliability in adults (Siegelman, Bogaerts, Christiansen, & Frost in Transactions of the Royal Society B, 372, 20160059, 2017a; Siegelman, Bogaerts, & Frost in Behavior Research Methods, 49, 418-432, 2017b). Even though similar measures are used to assess individual differences in children, no study to date has examined the reliability of these measures in development. This study examined the reliability of common SL measures in both children and adults. It assessed the reliability of three SL tasks (two auditory and one visual) twice (two months apart) in adults and children (mean age 8 years). Although the tasks showed moderate reliability in adults, they did not capture stable individual variation in children. None of the tasks were reliable across sessions, and all showed internal consistency measures well below psychometric standards. These findings raise significant concerns about the use of current SL measures to predict and explain individual differences in development. The article ends with a discussion of possible explanations for the difference in reliability between children and adults.
常用的统计学习任务能否捕捉到儿童个体差异的稳定性？婴儿、儿童和成人都能够使用统计学习 (SL) 来提取有关其环境的信息。尽管大多数研究都着眼于群体水平的表现，但越来越多的文献研究了 SL 中的个体差异及其与语言学习成果的关系：更擅长 SL 的个体预计会表现出更好的语言能力。因此，研究表明，在儿童和成人中，SL 表现与语言结果之间存在正相关。然而，这些研究通常使用旨在探索群体水平表现的任务，而没有对其进行修改，从而导致心理测量学上的缺陷，影响了成人的可靠性（Siegelman、Bogaerts、Christiansen 和 Frost 在《英国皇家学会学报 B》，372，20160059，2017a；Siegelman、Bogaerts 和 Frost 在《行为研究方法》，49，418-432，2017b）。即使使用类似的措施来评估儿童的个体差异，迄今为止还没有研究检验这些措施在发展中的可靠性。本研究检验了成人和儿童中常见 SL 测量的可靠性。它在成人和儿童中（平均年龄为 8 岁）两次（相隔两个月）评估了三个 SL 任务（两个听觉任务和一个视觉任务）的可靠性。虽然这些任务在成人中表现出中等的可靠性，但它们无法捕捉到儿童个体差异的稳定性。在两次会议中，没有一个任务是可靠的，所有任务的内部一致性测量都远低于心理测量学标准。这些发现对使用当前的 SL 措施来预测和解释发展中的个体差异提出了重大关注。文章最后讨论了儿童和成人之间可靠性差异的可能解释。
