Regularity of unit length boosts statistical learning in verbal and nonverbal artificial languages

Abstract

Humans have remarkable statistical learning abilities for verbal speech-like materials and for nonverbal music-like materials. Statistical learning has been shown with artificial languages (AL) that consist of the concatenation of nonsense word-like units into a continuous stream. These ALs contain no cues to unit boundaries other than the transitional probabilities between events, which are high within a unit and low between units. Most AL studies have used units of regular lengths. In the present study, the ALs were based on the same statistical structures but differed in unit length regularity (i.e., whether they were made out of units of regular vs. irregular lengths) and in materials (i.e., syllables vs. musical timbres), to allow us to investigate the influence of unit length regularity on domain-general statistical learning. In addition to better performance for verbal than for nonverbal materials, the findings revealed an effect of unit length regularity, with better performance for languages with regular-(vs. irregular-) length units. This unit length regularity effect suggests the influence of dynamic attentional processes (as proposed by the dynamic attending theory; Large & Jones (Psychological Review 106: 119-159, 1999)) on domain-general statistical learning.

Beat-based and memory-based temporal expectations in rhythm: similar perceptual effects, different underlying mechanisms

“…Given that detection rates on average did not exceed 82 percent, even in the fully predictable sequences, it is unlikely that the absence of a beat-based effect here was due to a ceiling effect. Moreover, we expected beat-based expectations to facilitate memory-based expectations, similar to the facilitation of content predictions ("what") afforded by temporal expectations (Auksztulewicz et al, 2018;Hoch, Tyler, & Tillmann, 2013;Schwartze, Rothermich, Schmidt-Kassow, & Kotz, 2011;Selchenkova, Jones, & Tillmann, 2014). However, if anything, the effect of predictability on target detection was smaller in the periodic than the aperiodic sequences.…”

Words and possible words in early language acquisition

“…We follow standard practice in the literature, comparing trisyllabic items against trisyllabic items, although this choice is ultimately arbitrary and may have experimental consequences. Indeed, infants and adults may be impaired by strings of various lengths (Hoch, Tyler, & Tillmann, 2012;Johnson & Tyler, 2010). Our research may be seen as largely independent of these issues, however, because we compare infants' ability to extract possible words or real words according to the nature of the familiarization stream they are exposed to, all else being equal.…”

Segmentation of Highly Vocalic Speech Via Statistical Learning: Initial Results From Danish, Norwegian, and English

“…However, there is also evidence that long exposure times can lead to worse segmentation accuracy (e.g., Endress & Bonatti, ). Moreover, the use of words of different length may have made the task generally harder (Hoch, Tyler, & Tillman, ), and the use of a cover task in our training block may have defeated our purpose of focusing the listeners’ attention on the task and accidentally affected their segmentation performance in a negative way. For example, Toro, Sinnett, and Soto‐Faraco () found that segmentation performance got significantly worse when their participants’ attention was diverted from the speech stream during training.…”