[PS-1.33] The role of precise phonological representations in auditory statistical learning

Elazar, A. ¹ , Bogaerts, L. ¹ , Wu, D. ² & Frost, R. ^{1, 3, 4}

1 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2 National Central University
3 Haskins Laboratories
4 The Basque Center of Cognition, Brain and Language

Does performance in the auditory statistical learning (SL) task reflect the mere ability to pick up linguistic regularities, or is it modulated by the quality of phonological representations of the native speaker? We presented Hebrew native speakers with auditory streams comprised of Chinese syllables akin to the classical Saffran et al. (1996) task. Contrary to typical performance in the task, performance was close to chance level with only two participants performing significantly above chance. In a second experiment we pre-expose subjects to the Chinese syllables, aiming to examine the impact of learning phonetic categories on regularity learning. Taken together, our findings illustrate the role of stable phonological representations in higher order SL computations of linguistic material. The theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed.