Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax.

Abstract

This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal ability. They also completed a syntactic priming task, which provided a dynamic index of children's facility to detect and respond to changes in the input frequency of linguistic structure. The results showed that implicit statistical learning ability was directly associated with the long-term maintenance of the primed structure. The results constitute the first empirical demonstration of a direct association between implicit statistical learning and syntactic acquisition in children.

Consistent and cumulative effects of syntactic experience in children’s sentence production: Evidence for error-based implicit learning

“…It is also consistent with evidence for individual differences in immediate effects of individual experiences (Kidd, 2012a(Kidd, , 2012b.…”

“…That is, some children appear to be more susceptible than others to effects of syntactic experience. Our experiment is not informative about the factors determining individual children's learning rate, but other studies suggest that relevant factors may include non-verbal IQ and statistical learning ability (Kidd, 2012a(Kidd, , 2012b. The finding that individual children's susceptibility to immediate passive priming at one timepoint correlated with their overall likelihood of passive production at a later timepoint following multiple experiences also follows from the assumption of a single implicit learning mechanism with an individually determined learning rate.…”

“…Chang et al (2006) proposed this parameter to capture individual differences in susceptibility to syntactic experience, and suggested that it might involve factors such as motivation and attention (as well as initial strength of structural representations); subsequent research suggests that other relevant factors might include potentially more stable characteristics such as statistical learning ability and non-verbal IQ (Kidd, 2012a(Kidd, , 2012b. The learning rate decreases with age (necessary to avoid early acquired knowledge being overwritten by recent experiences; McClelland, McNaughton, & O'Reilly, 1995); see Peter et al (2015) for discussion.…”

The role of cross-modal associations in statistical learning

“…Statistical learning is thought to scaffold more complex types of regularity learning, such as those prevalent in natural languages (Aslin & Newport, 2012;Frost, 2012). In line with this claim, statistical learning in the auditory as well as the visual modality correlates with language abilities (Arciuli & Simpson, 2012;Frost, Siegelman, Narkiss, & Afek, in press;Kidd, 2012;Mirman, Magnuson, Graf Estes, & Dixon, 2008).…”

Individual Differences in Statistical Learning: Conceptual and Measurement Issues

“…This state of affairs may be partly due to the fact that until recently (e.g., [27]), there has been some doubt as to whether substantive individual variation in SL ability (or, more generally, implicit learning of probabilistic structure) actually existed (e.g., [2]). A handful of studies on individual differences in SL ability have been reported over the past several years (e.g., [27,28,29]), with some studies reporting significant correlations between SL and language outcomes (e.g., [30]) and others reporting null or weak correlations (e.g., [31]). …”