Statistical Learning And Its Developmental Trajectory In 5~8 Years-Old Children:The Role Of Stimulus Type And Modality

Statistical learning(SL)is the ability of an individual to extract statistical rules from the surrounding environment.A large number of studies have shown that statistical learning is of great significance to children’s development.However,there are still many unclear and inconsistent results about the statistical learning and its developmental trajectory of children,especially the role and influence of stimulus type(linguistic and non-linguistic materials)and modality(auditory and visual),and numerous questions need to be investigated and clarified.Therefore,the current study takes children aged 5-8 years old as subjects,and uses syllables,environmental sounds,Chinese characters and objects as materials to explore the effects of stimulus type and modality on children’s statistical learning and developmental trajectory.The study contained two experiments.In experiment 1,96 children aged 5 to 8were selected to investigate children’s auditory statistical learning and its developmental trajectory of linguistic and non-linguistic materials by using the classic triplet learning paradigm.The subjects were asked to listen to the sounds composed of syllables and environmental sounds containing statistical rules respectively in the exposure phase.In the test phase,subjects were asked to choose the one they had heard before from two strings of triplet sounds.In experiment 2,96 children aged 5 to8 who had not participated in the experiment 1 were selected,and the classic triplet learning paradigm was used to investigate children’s visual statistics learning and developmental trajectory of linguistic and non-linguistic materials.The subjects were asked to look the picture stream consisting of Chinese characters and objects with statistical rules respectively in the exposure phase.And then in the test phase,the subjects were asked to select the one they had seen before from the two strings of triplet pictures.The results suggested that:(1)Children above 6 years old were able to perform auditory and visual statistical learning of linguistic and non-linguistic materials.(2)In terms of developmental trajectory,children’s auditory statistical learning of linguistic materials reached a mature level at the age of 6,and did not develop with age,while auditory statistical learning of non-linguistic materials developed with age.Visual statistical learning of both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli developed with age.(3)After controlling the age,the stimulus type had a significant impact on the developmental trajectory of children’s statistical learning: Statistical learning of linguistic materials had an obvious advantage of earlier development,and it did not continue to develop with the increase of grades on the basis of early development,while statistical learning of non-linguistic materials showed a trend of continuous development.(4)There was no significant correlation between children’s statistical learning performance under linguistic and non-linguistic materials in auditory and visual modality.(5)Taken linguistic and non-linguistic materials together,there was no significant difference in children’s visual and auditory statistical learning.These results show that children can extract rules from various environmental information and conduct statistical learning,and children’s statistical learning and its developmental trajectory are significantly affected by the types of stimuli,showing obvious development advantages in auditory linguistic materials.The current research results help us understand the domain-general and domain-specific nature of statistical learning,and prove that statistical learning may be a multi-component ability that follows the same calculation rules in a certain field,but is limited by input stimuli in the specific implementation.