Replication of Newport and Aslin (2004) 'Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies.' Experiment 2A

Abstract

We replicated Experiment 2A in Newport and Aslin (2004) 'Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies.' as part of an ongoing series of replications of auditory statistical learning studies with adults. The original study trained subjects on one of two languages defined by dependencies between non-adjacent syllables, finding below-chance performance in both cases. We only partly replicate this result, finding at-chance learning in both cases. While this is consistent with the original paper's claim that adults do not learn such languages, it may merely reflect very high uncertainty due to high degrees of variation across both subjects and items.