Individual differences in statistical learning predict children's reading ability in a semi-transparent orthography

Abstract

Learning to read is a milestone in a child's life, and reading ability is a strong predictor of academic outcomes. Some studies have revealed that individual differences in the capacity for implicit statistical learning are linked with children's reading skills in English, which has a deep orthography, but we do not know whether the same relation is found in semi-transparent orthographies such as Norwegian. Additionally, the relative contribution of statistical learning alongside other cognitive measures known to be related to reading has not been examined.This study of sixty-five Norwegian school children (M = 10.3 years) found that performance on an independent statistical learning task predicted a small, but unique amount of variance in reading ability in Norwegian, even when a number of other reading-related cognitive skills were taken into account. This suggests that children's implicit learning of statistical regularities is associated with proficiency with written language in a semi-transparent orthography such as Norwegian.

Visual statistical learning in children with and without DLD and its relation to literacy in children with DLD

“…Secondly, the hypothesis also predicts that the statistical learning deficit observed in children with DLD is domain-general and should thus also be present outside the auditory verbal domain. As for the first prediction, there is evidence that in typically developing (TD) children and in children with dyslexia, statistical learning of regularities between non-linguistic elements in the visual domain (e.g., unfamiliar cartoon-like characters, meaningless shapes or symbols) and visuomotor domain (e.g., a sequence of computer screen locations in which a cartoon or shape appears) correlates with reading performance (Arciuli & Simpson, 2012;Hedenius et al, 2013;Steacy et al, 2019;Vakil, Lowe, & Goldfus, 2015;van der Kleij, Groen, Segers, & Verhoeven, 2018;von Koss Torkildsen, Arciuli, & Wie, 2019) and grammar ability (meta-analysis by Hamrick et al, 2017). As for the second prediction, there is also evidence that children with DLD perform worse on statistical learning tasks with non-linguistic stimuli in the visuomotor domain than typically developing children (Lum, Conti-Ramsden, Morgan, & Ullman, 2014).…”

Implicit Statistical Learning across Modalities and its Relationship with Reading in Childhood

“…A smaller set of studies on ISL and typical reading has demonstrated correlations between ISL abilities and reading skills in first (Arciuli and Simpson, 2012b;e.g., Apfelbaum et al, 2012;Qi et al, 2019;von Koss Torkildsen et al, 2019; but see Schmalz et al, 2019 for contrasting results) and second language (Frost et al, 2013). The majority of these individual differences studies indexed ISL by one non-linguistic visual segmentation task (Arciuli and Simpson, 2012b;Frost et al, 2013;von Koss Torkildsen et al, 2019), yet without the (explicit) assumption that the observed relationship is dependent on the visual presentation modality or the type of input statistics the task of choice taps on. In the theorizing, ISL is typically treated as a unified theoretical construct, a "general capacity for picking up regularities" that is predicted to correlate with measures of literacy (see Siegelman et al, 2017a, for a discussion).…”

Statistical learning abilities and their relation to language

“…Individual‐differences studies from recent years confirm this prediction, suggesting that individual SL performance in fact predicts variability in linguistic outcomes. In this vein, individual differences in SL performance among both children and adults were shown to correlate with abilities such as syntactic processing (Kidd, ; Kidd & Arciuli, ; Misyak, Christiansen, & Tomblin, ), lexical knowledge and vocabulary size (Mainela‐Arnold & Evans, ; Shafto, Conway, Field, & Houston, ; Singh, Steven Reznick, & Xuehua, ; Spencer, Kaschak, Jones, & Lonigan, ), speech perception (Conway et al, ; Conway, Karpicke, & Pisoni, ; Lany, Shoaib, Thompson, & Estes, ), and literacy acquisition in first language (Arciuli & Simpson, ; Tong, Leung, & Tong, ; Torkildsen, Arciuli, & Wie, ) as well as second language (Frost, Siegelman, Narkiss, & Afek, ; A. Yu et al, ; see Arciuli, for a review). More direct evidence comes from a handful of longitudinal studies.…”