Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Feb;226:105570. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105570. Epub 2022 Oct 29.
Statistical learning (SL) is defined as our ability to use statistics (e.g., frequencies or transitional probabilities) to detect implicit regularities in the environment. Limited research has examined the developmental trajectory of SL across domains and modalities, and no previous research has made systematic comparisons across domains, modalities, and languages using comparable tasks. The current study investigated the development of SL ability across 9-, 11-, and 13-year-old native Chinese-speaking children in non-linguistic visual and auditory SL, first-language Chinese visual and auditory SL, and second-language English visual and auditory SL. Results showed that children across the three age groups achieved all types of SL, and they performed better in visual modality than in auditory modality. Furthermore, while visual SL constantly improved from 9- to 11- to 13-year-olds, auditory SL improved only from 11- to 13-year-olds but not from 9- to 11-year-olds, which could be explained by the discrepancy in developmental trajectory between auditory language and working memory. This pattern of age and modality interaction was similar across non-linguistic Chinese and English SL. A significant interaction between modality and language type also showed that better learning was achieved in visual SL as compared with auditory SL in both non-linguistic and English stimuli. However, children performed similarly across the two modalities in Chinese, possibly due to the contribution of tonal information. Together, our findings point to the joint function of age, modality, and language type in SL development.
统计学习（SL）被定义为我们使用统计学（例如频率或转移概率）来检测环境中隐含规律的能力。有限的研究已经检查了跨领域和模态的 SL 发展轨迹，并且以前没有研究使用可比任务在跨领域、模态和语言方面进行系统比较。本研究调查了 9 岁、11 岁和 13 岁的母语为汉语的儿童在非语言视觉和听觉 SL、第一语言中文视觉和听觉 SL 以及第二语言英语视觉和听觉 SL 中的 SL 能力的发展。结果表明，所有年龄段的儿童都实现了所有类型的 SL，并且在视觉模态下的表现优于听觉模态。此外，虽然视觉 SL 从 9 岁到 11 岁到 13 岁持续提高，但听觉 SL 仅从 11 岁到 13 岁提高，而不是从 9 岁到 11 岁提高，这可以用听觉语言和工作记忆之间发展轨迹的差异来解释。这种年龄和模态相互作用的模式在非语言中文和英语 SL 中是相似的。模态和语言类型之间的显著相互作用也表明，在非语言和英语刺激中，视觉 SL 的学习效果优于听觉 SL。然而，儿童在中文的两个模态中表现相似，可能是由于声调信息的贡献。总之，我们的发现表明年龄、模态和语言类型在 SL 发展中具有共同作用。
