Robustness of the adult statistical word segmentation literature: Part 1

Abstract

We report the first set of results in a multi-year project to replicate every adult statistical word segmentation study. We reported replications of six experiments. The purpose of these replications is both to assess the strength of the findings in the statistical learning literature but also to provide more accurate effect size estimates. In every instance, we were able to replicate successful learning. However, many theoretically important modulations of that learning failedto replicate. Moreover, learning success was generally much lower than in the original studies. In the General Discussion, we consider whether these differences are due to differences in subject populations, low power in the original studies, or some other factor. Regardless, these initial results suggest taking caution in relying on the originally reported findings.

Replication of Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, & Mehler (2005) Exp. 2a

“…However, it is widely observed that effects in the literature tend to be inflated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015;Trikalinos et al, 2004). Moreover, there is some evidence that statistical word segmentation effects are smaller in the general population than in college students (the population used by Bonatti and colleagues) (Hartshorne et al, 2017).…”

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

“…In this paper, we describe the methods and results for an online replication of experiment 2A from a classic statistical wordsegmentation paper by Newport and Aslin (2004) (henceforth: NA04). This experiment is part of a larger project to systematically replicate as many experiments involving statistical word learning in adults as possible and follows the first part of replications completed in 2017 (Hartshorne et al, 2017).…”

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

“…This experiment is part of a larger project to systematically replicate as many experiments involving statistical word learning in adults as possible and follows the first part of replications completed in 2017 (Hartshorne et al, 2017).…”