Kidd, E. 1, 2 , Smithson, M. 2 , Christiansen, M. 3 & Arciuli , J. 4
1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
2 The Australian National University
3 Cornell University
4 The University of Sydney
We report on the first longitudinal study of auditory and visual statistical learning in children. Children (N = 120) attending their first two years of primary school (M = 6;2, Range: 5;2 - 7;2) completed auditory and visual versions of the embedded triplet paradigm (with 2AFC test trials) four times across a period of 18 months (test sessions 6 months apart). The auditory task additionally incorporated a novel repetition component adapted for children (Isbilen et al., 2017). The visual task was originally reported by Arciuli & Simpson (2011). Children completed assessments of their language proficiency at each time point. Results confirmed earlier findings of improvement in SL across both domains with age. However, the tasks showed variable reliability: 2AFC components of the VSL and ASL tasks increased with age, but only the VSL task showed acceptable reliability and only at time points 3 and 4. The repetition component of the ASL task was more reliable at each time point. Time 3 and 4 VSL was concurrently and longitudinally related to language proficiency (.14 < r < .37, 9/10 correlations p < .05), whereas relationships between ASL measures and language were less clear. Theoretical and measurement issues will be discussed.