Adults who are deaf have been shown to have better visual attentional orienting than those with typical hearing, especially when the target is located in the periphery of the visual field. However, most studies in this population have assessed exogenous visual attention orienting (bottom-up processing of external cues) rather than endogenous visual attention orienting (top-down processing of internal cues). We used a target detection task to assess both types of visual attention orienting. A modified cue-target paradigm was adopted to assess the facilitation effects of exogenous and endogenous cues during short and long inter-stimulus intervals (ISI), using a 2 (Group: deaf/typically hearing) * 2 (Location: central/peripheral) * 2 (Cue Type: exogenous/endogenous) mixed factorial design. ANOVAs showed that both exogenous cues and endogenous cues can facilitate deaf adults’ visual attentional orienting, and the facilitation effect of exogenous cues on attention orienting was significantly stronger for deaf participants than hearing participants. When the ISI was long, the effect was significantly stronger when the exogenous cue appeared in the periphery of the visual field. In the periphery, deaf adults benefited most from exogenous cues, whereas hearing adults benefited most from endogenous cues. The results suggest that not only exogenous cues but also endogenous cues can facilitate deaf adults’ visual attentional orienting. However, the effect of exogenous cues appears to be greater, especially when the stimulus appears in the peripheral visual field.

One of the first problems in language learning is to segment words from continuous speech streams, and statistical learning is a powerful mechanism that allows learners to perform word segmentation. Yet some fundamental questions in statistical learning such as how much statistics is required for learning, as well as whether more exposure leads to better learning is still rarely studied. Using the classic word segmentation paradigm but with a large number of syllable sequences per subject, we find that exposure to a word form only two times leads to significant learning and more exposure (for instance, four times) leads to better learning. Furthermore, we observed large variability between the learning of different syllable sequences, which had the same distributional properties but used different syllable combinations making up the words. The variability in learning between different amount of exposure are related, suggesting that sequences have inherent learnability characteristics. We explored this variability with linguistic entrenchment, and show that the segmentation performance of particular sequences is associated with how familiar the novel word forms in the sequence are to the existing lexicon. The implications of these results to computational models of statistical learning and broader implications to language learning are discussed.