Abstract
For decades, implicit learning researchers have examined a variety of cognitive tasks in which people seem to automatically extract structure from the environment. Similarly, recent statistical learning studies have shown that people can learn word-object mappings from the repeated co-occurrence of words and objects in individually ambiguous situations. In light of this, the goal of the present paper is to investigate whether adult cross-situational learners require an explicit effort to learn word-object mappings, or if it may take place incidentally, only requiring attention to the stimuli. In two implicit learning experiments with incidental tasks directing participants' attention to different aspects of the stimuli, we found evidence of learning, suggesting that cross-situational learning mechanisms can operate incidentally, without explicit effort. However, performance was superior under explicit study instructions, indicating that strategic processes also play a role. Moreover, performance under instruction to learn word meanings did not differ from performance at counting co-occurrences, which may indicate these tasks engage similar strategies.
Highlights
Humans have a remarkable capacity to adapt to the regularities in our environment, and our everyday actions—from navigating highways to navigating conversations—bear testament to this ability
The goal of the current paper is to empirically investigate the automaticity of cross-situational statistical word learning in adults, who are typically given explicit instructions to learn the meaning of the words (e.g., Yu and Smith, 2007)
We set out to determine whether cross-situational word learning can be accomplished by mere exposure to the same type of training used in intentional settings
Summary
Humans have a remarkable capacity to adapt to the regularities in our environment, and our everyday actions—from navigating highways to navigating conversations—bear testament to this ability. We often seem to adapt without overt effort or even awareness of either the regularity, or of our changing behavior. Despite being mostly unable to enumerate the rules used to generate grammatical strings, participants had above-chance accuracy on the judgments. This is sometimes construed as evidence that participants have absorbed the underlying generative grammar, modeling work suggests that recognition memory is sufficient for making these judgments via global similarity comparisons (Jamieson and Mewhort, 2009)
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