Arnon, I. & Raviv, L.
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Research over the past twenty years has shown that humans have an amazing ability to learn statistical patterns in their environment in a variety of tasks and modalities (Saffran-et-al-1996). Though statistical learning (SL) is well-established for infants and adults, only few studies examine the developmental trajectory of SL across a wide age-range [Arciuli-Simpson-2011]. Even less work has compared auditory and visual SL across development. To address these issues, we conducted a large-scale developmental study of both auditory and visual SL across a wide age-range (4-14, N=200), with two questions in mind: 1) Does auditory and visual SL improve with age? 2) Will there be a difference in SL abilities between the modalities? The results show that SL abilities improved with age in both modalities with visual learning being overall better. These results suggest that SL is not a unitary, stable mechanism, but rather one affected by (a) modality: learning was better in the visual domain despite similar TPs and exposure, and (b) age: SL abilities improve with age, unlike language learning, which tends to deteriorate with age. We discuss implications for models of SL, and the role of SL in first language acquisition.