Statistical Learning of Non-word Sequences among Typical Adults

Abstract

Language is one of the many abilities that are unique to humankind. The link between language and cognition has been studied upon extensively through theories, models and experimental investigations. The interplay between the components of language and cognition has a vital role in processes such as language acquisition, word learning, sentence processing, etc. The implicit process involved in extracting the sequential patterns from input is known as statistical learning. Studies have explored statistical learning from developmental and modality perspectives. The current study aimed to investigate the statistical learning of non-word sequences among 30 (15 males and 15 females) typical adults with the mean age of 21.64 years. The stimuli consisted of 40 non-words formed through syllable transposition and syllable substitution with different syllable lengths. The study was carried out in two phases, namely the training and testing phases. Results revealed a significant effect of training and varying syllable lengths in task performance.