Abstract
A number of experiments support the hypothetical utility of statistical information for language learning and processing among both children and adults. However, tasks in these studies are often very general, and only a few include populations with developmental language disorder (DLD). We wanted to determine whether a stronger relationship might be shown when the measure of statistical learning is chosen for its relevance to the language task when including a substantial number of participants with DLD. The language ability we measured was sensitivity to verb bias – the likelihood of a verb to appear with a certain argument or interpretation. A previous study showed adults with DLD were less sensitive to verb bias than their typical peers. Verb bias sensitivity had not yet been tested in children with DLD. In Study 1, 49 children, ages 7–9 years, 17 of whom were classified as having DLD, completed a task designed to measure sensitivity to verb bias through implicit and explicit measures. We found children with and without DLD showed sensitivity to verb bias in implicit but not explicit measures, with no differences between groups. In Study 2, we used a multiverse approach to investigate whether individual differences in statistical learning predicted verb bias sensitivity in these participants as well as in a dataset of adult participants. Our analysis revealed no evidence of a relationship between statistical learning and verb bias sensitivity in children, which was not unexpected given we found no group differences in Study 1. Statistical learning predicted sensitivity to verb bias as measured through explicit measures in adults, though results were not robust. These findings suggest that verb bias may still be relatively unstable in school age children, and thus may not play the same role in sentence processing in children as in adults. It would also seem that individuals with DLD may not be using the same mechanisms during processing as their typically developing (TD) peers in adulthood. Thus, statistical information may differ in relevance for language processing in individuals with and without DLD.
Highlights
Statistical learning is often studied in the context of language learning because researchers have considered statistical learning tasks as representative of the types of tasks that people face when learning language
We found some evidence that individual differences in statistical learning predicted performance on the verb bias task in adult participants but not in children, but the findings are not robust
This was not especially surprising given that adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) showed differences from TD peers on the verb bias task, but Study 1 did not demonstrate that individual differences in language proficiency or text exposure predicted performance by child participants
Summary
Statistical learning is often studied in the context of language learning because researchers have considered statistical learning tasks as representative of the types of tasks that people face when learning language. Spit and Rispens (2019) found that gifted children showed better comprehension of object relative clauses than their same-age peers, performance on a serial reaction time task did not account for this variability This finding is evidence that statistical learning in general may not have a strong relationship with language ability. TD children showed no differences in verb bias sensitivity compared with adults in both their choice of interpretation and in eye tracking measures of where they looked while completing the task. Children did show different patterns of choice and looking behavior than adults when two referents were present We adapted this task for use with mouse tracking in our study of verb bias sensitivity in college students with DLD (Hall et al, 2019).
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