The developmental trajectory of children's auditory and visual statistical learning abilities: modality‐based differences in the effect of age

Abstract

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks and across modalities (e.g., auditory, visual), raising questions on the domain generality of SL. However, while SL is well established for infants and adults, only little is known about its developmental trajectory during childhood, leaving two important questions unanswered: (1) Is SL an early-maturing capacity that is fully developed in infancy, or does it improve with age like other cognitive capacities (e.g., memory)? and (2) Will SL have similar developmental trajectories across modalities? Only few studies have looked at SL across development, with conflicting results: some find age-related improvements while others do not. Importantly, no study to date has examined auditory SL across childhood, nor compared it to visual SL to see if there are modality-based differences in the developmental trajectory of SL abilities. We addressed these issues by conducting a large-scale study of children's performance on matching auditory and visual SL tasks across a wide age range (5-12y). Results show modality-based differences in the development of SL abilities: while children's learning in the visual domain improved with age, learning in the auditory domain did not change in the tested age range. We examine these findings in light of previous studies and discuss their implications for modality-based differences in SL and for the role of auditory SL in language acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kg35hoF0pw.

Statistical Learning Is Not Age‐Invariant During Childhood: Performance Improves With Age Across Modality

“…Performance was better in the visual task compared to the auditory task (t(228) = 2.45, p < .01), consistent with previous findings of a visual advantage in children of the same ages (Raviv & Arnon, 2018). Table 1 shows accuracy across development (in 5-year-and-a-half age bins of similar size, following Raviv & Arnon, 2018). We use these bins only for presentational clarity: In the analyses, age was entered in half years, without any additional division into bins.…”

“…Adults show better learning in the auditory domain compared to the visual one (Conway & Christiansen, ; Emberson et al., ; Siegelman & Frost, ), a finding taken to reflect the greater sensitivity of audition to temporal regularities. Children, in contrast, show better learning in the visual domain (Raviv & Arnon, ; the current paper). Rather than reflecting a developmental stage, this discrepancy may stem from the different stimuli used in child and adult studies.…”

“…We examine performance on a non-linguistic auditory task (using familiar sounds) and a visual one (using object drawings) across childhood. If the effect of age on SL is dependent on modality, reflecting constraints of the auditory system, we expect to see an improvement with age for the visual task, but not the auditory one, similar to Raviv and Arnon (2018). If, in contrast, the effect of age is stimuli-sensitive and age invariance is unique to linguistic elements, performance should improve with age for both the visual and non-linguistic auditory tasks.…”

Comparing statistical learning across perceptual modalities in infancy: An investigation of underlying learning mechanism(s)

“…Studies of SL in childhood present a convergent picture where visual SL continues to develop into childhood suggesting an earlier development of auditory SL (Raviv & Arnon, 2018). In particular, our results point to an inflection point around 9 months.…”

Statistical learning abilities and their relation to language

“…First, multiple studies provide evidence for qualitative differences in SL across sensory modalities (i.e., across SL in visual, auditory, and tactile inputs). Such studies documented different learning biases in the visual, auditory and tactile modalities (Conway & Christiansen, ), different effects of presentation parameters in learning visual versus auditory material (Conway & Christiansen, ; Emberson, Conway, & Christiansen, ), and different developmental trajectories for visual and auditory SL (Raviv & Arnon, ). In addition to these findings that support modality‐specific computations in SL, other studies further point to differences in the assimilation of different types of information, even within a modality.…”