How statistical learning interacts with the socioeconomic environment to shape children's language development.

Leyla Eghbalzad,Joanne A Deocampo,Christopher M Conway,Aaron Jon Newman

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0244954

Leyla Eghbalzad, Joanne A Deocampo + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244954

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jan 22, 2021
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Georgia State University

Abstract

Language is acquired in part through statistical learning abilities that encode environmental regularities. Language development is also heavily influenced by social environmental factors such as socioeconomic status. However, it is unknown to what extent statistical learning interacts with SES to affect language outcomes. We measured event-related potentials in 26 children aged 8-12 while they performed a visual statistical learning task. Regression analyses indicated that children's learning performance moderated the relationship between socioeconomic status and both syntactic and vocabulary language comprehension scores. For children demonstrating high learning, socioeconomic status had a weaker effect on language compared to children showing low learning. These results suggest that high statistical learning ability can provide a buffer against the disadvantages associated with being raised in a lower socioeconomic status household.

Highlights

The seeming ease with which typically developing children learn to comprehend and produce language suggests the existence of universal biological learning mechanisms [1, 2]
The response times for 2 participants were not recorded during the event-related potential (ERP) data acquisition; the ERP responses for these participants were intact
The results for the second half of the task revealed significantly quicker responses to the target for the high (M = 377.22, SD = 86.06) compared to the lowprobability condition (M = 465.32, SD = 77.85,), t(23) = - 3.67, p = .001 which suggest that learning was evident in both halves of the task

Summary

Introduction

The seeming ease with which typically developing children learn to comprehend and produce language suggests the existence of universal biological learning mechanisms [1, 2]. The brain’s ability to detect and encode probabilistic patterns in the environment, and use such knowledge to predict upcoming stimuli and events, is thought to be a crucial component of cognition [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] This type of learning, referred to as statistical learning, can take place without conscious awareness [14] and may unfold simultaneously as in the visual domain (e.g. pictures; [15]) or sequentially as in the auditory domain

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