From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units. Statistical learning, the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence has (...) been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials while 5-year-old children and young adults were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development. (shrink)

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood to see whether it is fully developed in infancy or improves with age, like many other cognitive abilities. A recent study showed modality‐based differences in the effect of age (...) during childhood: While visual SL improved with age, auditory SL did not. This finding was taken as evidence for modality‐based differences in SL. However, since that study used auditory linguistic stimuli (syllables), the differential effect of age may have been driven by stimulus type (linguistic vs. non‐linguistic) rather than modality. Here, we ask whether age will affect performance similarly in the two modalities when non‐linguistic auditory stimuli are used (familiar sounds instead of syllables). We conduct a large‐scale study of children's performance on visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL during childhood (ages 5–12 years). The results show a similar effect of age in both modalities: Unlike previous findings, both visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL improved with age. These findings highlight the stimuli‐sensitive nature of SL and suggest that modality‐based differences may be stimuli‐dependent, and that age‐invariance may be limited to linguistic stimuli. (shrink)

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of word‐like strings of sounds, regularly occurring in religious mass gatherings or various forms of private religious practices (e.g., prayer and meditation). Although specific verbal learning capacities may characterize glossolalists, empirical evidence is lacking. We administered three statistical learning tasks (artificial grammar, phoneme sequence, and visual‐response sequence) to 30 glossolalists and 30 matched control volunteers. In artificial grammar, participants decide whether pseudowords and sentences follow previously acquired implicit rules or not. In sequence (...) learning, they gradually draw out rules from repeating regularities in sequences of speech sounds or motor responses. Results revealed enhanced artificial grammar and phoneme sequence learning performances in glossolalists compared to control volunteers. There were significant positive correlations between daily glossolalia activity and artificial grammar learning. These results indicate that glossolalists exhibit enhanced abilities to extract the statistical regularities of verbal information, which may be related to their unusual language abilities. (shrink)

The present study investigates procedural learning of motor sequences in children with developmental coordination disorder and/or developmental dyslexia, typically-developing children and healthy adults with a special emphasis on the role of the nature of stimuli and the neuropsychological functions associated to final performance of the sequence. Seventy children and ten adults participated in this study and were separated in five experimental groups: TD, DCD, DD, and DCD + DD children and adults. Procedural learning was assessed with a serial reaction time (...) task that required to tap on a specific key as accurately and quickly as possible when stimuli appeared on the screen. Three types of stimuli were proposed as cues: the classical version of the SRTT with 4 squares aligned horizontally on the screen, giving visuospatial cues, and two modified versions, with 4 letters aligned horizontally on the screen and letters at the center of the screen. Reaction times during the repeated and random blocks allowed assessing three phases of learning: global learning, specific learning and retention of the sequence. Learning was considered as completed when RT evolved significantly in the three phases. Neuropsychological assessment involved, among other functions, memory and attentional functions. Our main result was that learning and retention were not influenced by the available cues in adults whereas learning improved with specific cues in children with or without neurodevelopmental disorders. More precisely, learning was not completed with L cues in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. For children with DD, learning was completed with the VS and VS + L cues whereas for children with DCD, learning was completed with combined VS + L cues. Comorbidity between DD and DCD had no more impact on procedural learning than DCD alone. These results suggest that learning depends on the nature of cues available during practice and that cues allowing learning and retention depend on the type of disorder. Moreover, selective attention was correlated with RT during retention, suggesting that this neuropsychological function is important for procedural learning whatever the available cues. (shrink)

In this article, Arnon explores the link between implicit learning, statistical learning and language development. She focuses on two central themes, namely the issue of age invariance and the question of variation in learning outcomes. Arnon suggests that the two literatures are studying a fundamentally similar phenomenon and argues in favor of a closer alignment. However, she also raises important methodological concerns.