Abstract
The current study sought to examine the contribution of auditory and visual statistical learning on language and social competency abilities as well as whether decreased statistical learning abilities are related to increased autistic traits. To answer these questions, participants’ (N = 95) auditory and visual statistical learning abilities, language, social competency, and level of autistic traits were assessed. Although the relationships observed were relatively small in magnitude, our results demonstrated that visual statistical learning related to language and social competency abilities and that auditory learning was more related to autism symptomatology than visual statistical learning. Furthermore, the relationship between visual statistical learning and social competency was mediated by language comprehension abilities, suggesting that impairments in statistical learning may cascade into impairments in language and social abilities.
Highlights
Over time, we learn which pieces of information belong together or follow one another more frequently and are able to identify these relationships by uncovering the probabilistic information occurring within them[1]
Consistent with previous research, our results show that visual statistical learning abilities are related to receptive language[75] in that an increased ability to learn patterns in the visual domain is related to increased language comprehension
Our results demonstrate a clear relationship between statistical learning, language, and social competency abilities as well as statistical learning and autistic traits
Summary
We learn which pieces of information belong together or follow one another more frequently and are able to identify these relationships by uncovering the probabilistic information occurring within them[1] This process, known as statistical learning, functions implicitly[2,3] and allows individuals to track patterns and probabilities within the environment, and to predict what pieces of information will come [4,5,6]. Learning was measured through looking times where, as expected, infants showed longer looking times to the novel shape pairs compared to the familiar pairs These findings, along with other research showing that infants and adults are able to learn statistical patterns presented in tone sequences[31,32] indicate that statistical learning is occurring across modalities whereby learners are able to use transitional probabilities to segment sequences across multiple sensory modalities
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