van der Ham, S. 1 , Raviv, L. 2 & de Boer, B. . 1
1 Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
2 Max Planck Institute Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Few studies have examined statistical learning (SL) across modalities using comparable tasks, despite the relevance of such findings to two important questions on the nature of SL and its role in language learning: (1) Is SL a modality-sensitive ability? (2) Does SL in a linguistic context work differently than in other contexts? We addressed these two questions by conducting a within-subject comparison of SL abilities in three modalities: auditory (linguistic and non-linguistic), visual and tactile. We examined learners' behavior in item learning (measured by a passive categorization task) and rule learning (measured by an active production task) after exposure to signals that varied according to duration (i.e. Distributional Learning paradigm) in these modalities. We found that participants' categorization and production performance was positively correlated in some of the conditions, but not all, suggesting that SL abilities do not operate as a unitary mechanism. Furthermore, although learners performed best at categorizing linguistic auditory signals, they were most precise when reproducing signals in the non-linguistic auditory condition. Together, these results suggest that learners treat language-like signals differently compared to non-linguistic signals, which may be caused by extensive prior exposure to auditory linguistic signals compared to other signals.