Multi-Pattern Visual Statistical Learning in Monolinguals and Bilinguals.

Federica Bulgarelli,Laura Bosch,Daniel J Weiss

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00204

Abstract

To date, the impact of bilingualism on statistical learning remains unclear. Here we test a novel visual statistical learning task that affords simultaneous learning of two types of regularities: co-occurrence regularities between pairs of elements and the co-occurrence of visual features that could define categories. We compared performance by English monolinguals, Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, as previous studies have suggested that bilinguals might be more open than monolinguals to the presence of multiple regularities, though no previous studies have tested the learning of multiple patterns within a single task. We demonstrated that both monolingual and bilingual participants could learn the co-occurrence probabilities and the features that define categories. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that learners can extract co-occurrence regularities along two dimensions in the visual modality. However, we did not detect significant differences in performance across groups. We close by discussing the implications for the growing literature on bilingualism and statistical learning.

Highlights

The benefits of bilingualism are thought to extend beyond linguistic knowledge, impacting a wide variety of cognitive and social abilities across the lifespan (e.g., Bialystok, 1999; Goetz, 2003; Greenberg et al, 2013; though see Paap and Greenberg, 2013. for a dissenting view)
As differences in cognitive tasks between monolinguals and bilinguals are thought to arise early in development (e.g., Kovács and Mehler, 2009a,b; Sebastián-Gallés et al, 2012) it is natural to wonder whether bilingual experience impacts statistical learning, the ability to track distributional regularities from sensory input
The current study explored whether bilingual experience impacts statistical learning when two types of regularities are simultaneously available in the input, including spatial relationships between objects and visual feature co-occurrences within objects

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The benefits of bilingualism are thought to extend beyond linguistic knowledge, impacting a wide variety of cognitive and social abilities across the lifespan (e.g., Bialystok, 1999; Goetz, 2003; Greenberg et al, 2013; though see Paap and Greenberg, 2013. for a dissenting view). In contrast to the infant study by Antovich and Graf Estes (2017), experiments with adults in which two statistically incongruent languages were presented with only a single switch midstream find that both monolinguals and late bilinguals exhibit a primacy effect, learning the first language but not the second (Gebhart et al, 2009; Bogulski, 2013; Bulgarelli and Weiss, 2016) These differences may be due to the inventory of the languages (congruent versus incongruent), the number of switches between the languages, general task differences in measuring performance between infants and adults or the age of acquisition of each language for the bilinguals Earlier exposure to a second language (as in the case of simultaneous or early sequential bilinguals) may facilitate differences in learning (Escudero et al, 2016; Antovich and Graf Estes, 2017) With these ideas in mind, the present study sought to extend the research comparing monolingual and bilingual learners on learning multiple structures by presenting a task that affords tracking of two regularities simultaneously. Our participants completed a working memory task (operational span), which allowed us to gain some insight as to how working memory differences might relate to performance on the experimental task

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ETHICS STATEMENT