Specificity of Motor Contributions to Auditory Statistical Learning

Abstract

Statistical learning is the ability to extract patterned information from continuous sensory signals. Recent evidence suggests that auditory-motor mechanisms play an important role in auditory statistical learning from speech signals. The question remains whether auditory-motor mechanisms support such learning generally or in a domain-specific manner. In Experiment 1, we tested the specificity of motor processes contributing to learning patterns from speech sequences. Participants either whispered or clapped their hands while listening to structured speech. In Experiment 2, we focused on auditory specificity, testing whether whispering equally affects learning patterns from speech and non-speech sequences. Finally, in Experiment 3, we examined whether learning patterns from speech and non-speech sequences are correlated. Whispering had a stronger effect than clapping on learning patterns from speech sequences in Experiment 1. Moreover, whispering impaired statistical learning more strongly from speech than non-speech sequences in Experiment 2. Interestingly, while participants in the non-speech tasks spontaneously synchronized their motor movements with the auditory stream more than participants in the speech tasks, the effect of the motor movements on learning was stronger in the speech domain. Finally, no correlation between speech and non-speech learning was observed. Overall, our findings support the idea that learning statistical patterns from speech versus non-speech relies on segregated mechanisms, and that the speech motor system contributes to auditory statistical learning in a highly specific manner.

Modality and stimulus effects on distributional statistical learning: Sound vs. sight, time vs. space

“…Indeed, a follow-up study indicated that the developmental trajectories of visual and non-linguistic auditory SL are in fact similar when the auditory SL task used familiar sounds (e.g., a bird tweeting, a door opening) rather than syllables (Shufaniya & Arnon, 2018). Learning linguistic materials and non-linguistic materials were also found to be differentially affected by concurrent motor productionthe learning of linguistic sequences was hindered when participants had to whisper, whereas the learning of nonlinguistic sequences was not (Boeve et al, 2024). Together, these findings suggest that linguistic information may be processed and learned differently compared to non-linguistic information.…”