Palmer, S. & Mattys, S.
University of York
The purpose of this study was to examine whether working memory resources are recruited during statistical learning (SL). Participants were asked to identify novel words in an artificial speech stream where the transitional probability between syllables provided the only segmentation cue. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that segmentation performance improved when the speech rate was slowed down, suggesting that SL is supported by some form of active processing or maintenance mechanism which operates more effectively under slower stimulus presentation rates. In Experiment 3 we investigated the nature of this mechanism by asking participants to perform a concurrent 2-back task while listening to the speech stream. Half of the participants performed a 2-back rhyme task designed to engage phonological processing, whereas the other half performed a 2-back shape matching task. It was hypothesised that if SL is dependent only upon domain-specific processes (i.e., phonological rehearsal), then the rhyme task should impair speech segmentation performance more than the shape task. It was observed however, that both load types were equally disruptive to learning. These results suggest that SL is supported by working-memory processes that rely on domain-general resources.