Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University.
Dev Psychol. 2021 May;57(5):733-748. doi: 10.1037/dev0000998.
Concurrent learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies has been shown in adults only. This study extended this line of research by examining dependency-specific learning for both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies concurrently in both adults and children. Seventy adults aged 18 to 64 (40 women, 30 men; Experiment 1) and 64 children aged 10 to 11 years (40 girls, 24 boys; Experiment 2) were tested with a new serial reaction time (SRT) task in which they were trained for 5-8 min on materials comprising equally probable adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. They were then asked to discriminate between trained and untrained dependencies in a familiarity task. Both adults and children showed implicit concurrent learning of both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. The two dependency types were learned to the same extent. However, adults showed a rapid, sustainable, and dependency-specific sensitivity throughout the SRT task while children only showed a dependency-specific sensitivity to violations of expectations after exposure. When the two groups were statistically compared, only adults showed a dependency-specific learning effect after exposure. These findings are in line with the age-related improvement model of dependency learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
成年人仅在相邻和非相邻依存关系的并发学习中表现出来。本研究通过同时检查成年人和儿童对相邻和非相邻依存关系的依存关系特异性学习，扩展了这一研究思路。70 名 18 至 64 岁的成年人（40 名女性，30 名男性；实验 1）和 64 名 10 至 11 岁的儿童（40 名女孩，24 名男孩；实验 2）在一个新的序列反应时间（SRT）任务中接受了测试，他们在 5-8 分钟的时间内接受了包含同等概率的相邻和非相邻依存关系的材料训练。然后，他们在熟悉度任务中被要求区分训练和未训练的依存关系。成年人和儿童都表现出对相邻和非相邻依存关系的隐性并发学习。两种依存关系类型的学习程度相同。然而，成年人在 SRT 任务中表现出快速、可持续和依存关系特异性的敏感性，而儿童仅在暴露后对违反预期的情况表现出依存关系特异性敏感性。当对这两个组进行统计比较时，只有成年人在暴露后表现出依存关系特异性学习效应。这些发现与依存关系学习的年龄相关改善模型一致。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。
