Statistical learning (SL) is believed to enable language acquisition by allowing individuals to learn regularities within linguistic input. However, neural evidence supporting a direct relationship between SL and language ability is scarce. We investigated whether there are associations between event-related potential (ERP) correlates of SL and language abilities while controlling for the general level of selective attention. Seventeen adults completed tests of visual SL, receptive vocabulary, grammatical ability, and sentence completion. Response times and ERPs showed that SL is related to receptive vocabulary and grammatical ability. ERPs indicated that the relationship between SL and grammatical ability was independent of attention while the association between SL and receptive vocabulary depended on attention. The implications of these dissociative relationships in terms of underlying mechanisms of SL and language are discussed. These results further elucidate the cognitive nature of the links between SL mechanisms and language abilities.

Languages differ systematically in the way they express spatial motion, rendering it as a highly relevant domain to examine effects of language on nonverbal representation of events. In this chapter, we focus on Turkish and English, the two languages that differ strongly in their expression of motion events. Our review of existing work – spanning across adult and child native speakers of the two languages (as well as several others) – suggests early emergence of language-specific patterns in speech, and possibly in gesture. Our review also highlights some key areas of further research that could shed new light on the effect of language on nonverbal representation of motion, particularly at the early ages.

A growing body of research suggests that jazz musicians concatenate stored auditory and motor patterns during improvisation. We hypothesized that this mechanism allows musicians to focus attention more flexibly during improvisation; for example, on interaction with other ensemble members. We tested this idea by analyzing the frequency of repeated melodic patterns in improvisations by artist-level pianists forced to attend to a secondary unrelated counting task. Indeed, we found that compared to their own improvisations performed in a baseline control condition, participants used significantly more repeated patterns when their attention was focused on the secondary task. This main effect was independent of whether participants played in a familiar or unfamiliar key and held true using various measurements for pattern use.

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