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Rapid individual cognitive phenotyping holds the potential to revolutionize domains as wide-ranging as personalized learning, employment practices, and precision psychiatry. Going beyond limitations imposed by traditional lab-based experiments, new efforts have been underway towards greater ecological validity and participant diversity to capture the full range of individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors across the general population. Building on this, we developed Skill Lab, a novel game-based tool that simultaneously assesses a broad suite of cognitive abilities while providing an engaging narrative. Skill Lab consists of six mini-games as well as 14 established cognitive ability tasks. Using a popular citizen science platform (N = 10725), we conducted a comprehensive validation in the wild of a game-based cognitive assessment suite. Based on the game and validation task data, we constructed reliable models to simultaneously predict eight cognitive abilities based on the users' in-game behavior. Follow-'-up validation tests revealed that the models can discriminate nuances contained within each separate cognitive ability as well as capture a shared main factor of generalized cognitive ability. Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent task-based measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of certain cognitive abilities with age in our large cross-sectional population sample (N = 6369). Taken together, our results demonstrate the feasibility of rapid in-the-wild systematic assessment of cognitive abilities as a promising first step towards population-scale benchmarking and individualized mental health diagnostics., 24 pages, 8 figures, and 4 tables. Supplementary Information: osf.io/pnw5z//

Prior investigations have demonstrated that people tend to link pseudowords such as bouba to rounded shapes and kiki to spiky shapes, but the cognitive processes underlying this matching bias have remained controversial. Here, we present three experiments underscoring the fundamental role of emotional mediation in this sound–shape mapping. Using stimuli from key previous studies, we found that kiki-like pseudowords and spiky shapes, compared with bouba-like pseudowords and rounded shapes, consistently elicit higher levels of affective arousal, which we assessed through both subjective ratings (Experiment 1, N = 52) and acoustic models implemented on the basis of pseudoword material (Experiment 2, N = 70). Crucially, the mediating effect of arousal generalizes to novel pseudowords (Experiment 3, N = 64, which was preregistered). These findings highlight the role that human emotion may play in language development and evolution by grounding associations between abstract concepts (e.g., shapes) and linguistic signs (e.g., words) in the affective system.

Available online 19 November 2021 A growing body of research investigates individual differences in the learning of statistical structure, tying them to variability in cognitive (dis)abilities. This approach views statistical learning (SL) as a general individual ability that underlies performance across a range of cognitive domains. But is there a general SL capacity that can sort individuals from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ statistical learners? Explicating the suppositions underlying this approach, we suggest that current evidence supporting it is meager. We outline an alternative perspective that considers the variability of statistical environments within different cognitive domains. Once we focus on learning that is tuned to the statistics of real-world sensory inputs, an alternative view of SL computations emerges with a radically different outlook for SL research. This article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant Project 692502-L2STAT and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Grant Project 705/20, awarded to R.F. L.B. received funding from the ERC Advanced Grant Project 833029-LEARNATTEND. N.S. received funding from the ISF, grant number 48/20

It is often assumed that all languages are equal in some important sense. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, while largely leaving aside questions of language learning and use. Here, we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related languages, Danish has an unusually reduced phonetic structure, which seemingly delays Danish-learning children in several aspects of their language acquisition. Adult language use appears to be affected as well, resulting, among other things, in an increased dependence on top-down information in comprehension. In this conceptual review, we build the argument that a causal relationship may exist between the sound structure of Danish and the peculiarities of its acquisition and use. We argue that a theory of language learning that accommodates the existing evidence from Danish must explicitly account for the interaction between learner-related factors and language-specific constraints.

High frequency words play a key role in language acquisition, with recent work suggesting they may serve both speech segmentation and lexical categorisation. However, it is not yet known whether infants can detect novel high frequency words in continuous speech, nor whether they can use them to help learning for segmentation and categorisation at the same time. For instance, when hearing “you eat the biscuit”, can children use the high-frequency words “you” and “the” to segment out “eat” and “biscuit”, and determine their respective lexical categories? We tested this in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we familiarised 12-month-old infants with continuous artificial speech comprising repetitions oftarget words, which were preceded by high-frequencymarker wordsthat distinguished the targets into two distributional categories. In Experiment 2, we repeated the task using the same language but with additional phonological cues to word and category structure. In both studies, we measured learning with head-turn preference tests of segmentation and categorisation, and compared performance against a control group that heard the artificial speech without the marker words (i.e., just the targets). There was no evidence that high frequency words helped either speech segmentation or grammatical categorisation. However, segmentation was seen to improve when the distributional information was supplemented with phonological cues (Experiment 2). In both experiments, exploratory analysis indicated that infants’ looking behaviour was related to their linguistic maturity (indexed by infants’ vocabulary scores) with infants with high versus low vocabulary scores displaying novelty and familiarity preferences, respectively. We propose that high-frequency words must reach a critical threshold of familiarity before they can be of significant benefit to learning.

Statistical learning (SL) has been a prominent focus of research in developmental and adult populations, guided by the assumption that it is a fundamental component of learning underlying higher-order cognition. In developmental populations, however, there have been recent concerns regarding the degree to which many current tasks reliably measure SL, particularly in younger children. In the current article, we present the results of two studies that measured auditory statistical learning (ASL) of linguistic stimuli in children aged 5–8 years. Children listened to 6 min of continuous syllables comprising four trisyllabic pseudowords. Following the familiarization phase, children completed (a) a two-alternative forced-choice task and (b) a serial recall task in which they repeated either target sequences embedded during familiarization or foils, manipulated for sequence length. Results showed that, although both measures consistently revealed learning at the group level, the recall task better captured learning across the full range of abilities and was more reliable at the individual level. We conclude that, as has also been demonstrated in adults, the method holds promise for future studies of individual differences in ASL of linguistic stimuli.

Are all languages processed in the same way, or might typological variation cause systematic differences between languages? We explore this question through a cross-linguistic comparison of categorical perception in two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We employ drift diffusion models to reveal cross-linguistic differences in the role of context: Danish – a more phonologically-opaque language – shows equally strong context effects of both near and distal context, while Norwegian shows stronger context effect of near than distal context. We argue that the difference is due to a processing strategy: due to the more transparent sound structure of their language, Norwegians pay more attention to local acoustic information - while Danes, due to the opaque phonology of Danish, seem to use later-occurring contextual information to a larger extent. Indeed, when forcing participants to delay their decision until the full information is available, Norwegians show choice patterns more similar to those of Danes. Our findings highlight the importance of cross-linguistic studies, as even closely related languages like Danish and Norwegian, appear to be processed differently contingent on individual properties of the specific language.

Available online 11 August 2020. Over the last two decades statistical learning (SL) has evolved into a key explanatory mechanism underlying the incidental learning of regularities across different domains of cognition, such as language, visual and auditory perception, and memory. Yet SL has mainly been investigated as an independent research area, separated from the primary study of the relevant cognitive domains. The aim of this special issue is to foster a bilateral integration of SL research with cognitive science: not only should domain-relevant evidence about the complexity of real-world input become more tightly integrated into SL research, but non-SL studies should also carefully consider the nature and range of statistical regularities that may affect learning and processing in a given domain. Four papers on reading in this volume demonstrate that such integration can lead to a better understanding of reading, while also revealing the complexity and abundance of different statistical patterns present in printed text. Moving beyond disciplinary boundaries has the promise to broaden the focus of SL research beyond simple artificial patterns, to examine the rich and subtle intricacies of real-world cognition. A final paper on the neurobiological underpinnings of SL and the consolidation of learned statistical regularities further illustrates what might be gained from a better integration of SL and memory research. We conclude by discussing possible directions for taking an integrative approach to SL forward. This paper was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced grant (project 692502-L2STAT) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program awarded to RF. MHC was supported in part by the Danish Council for Independent Research (FKK-grant DFF- 7013-00074).

New linguistic information must be integrated into our existing language system. Using a novel experimental task that incorporates a syntactic priming paradigm into artificial language learning, we investigated how new grammatical regularities and words are learned. This innovation allowed us to control the language input the learner received, while the syntactic priming paradigm provided insight into the nature of the underlying syntactic processing machinery. The results of the present study pointed to facilitatory syntactic processing effects within the first days of learning: Syntactic and lexical priming effects revealed participants' sensitivity to both novel words and word orders. This suggested that novel syntactic structures and their meaning (form-function mapping) can be acquired rapidly through incidental learning. More generally, our study indicated similar mechanisms for learning and processing in both artificial and natural languages, with implications for the relationship between first and second language learning.

Previous research has shown that Danish-learning children lag behind in early lexical acquisition compared with children learning a number of other languages. This delay has been ascribed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which appears to have fewer reliable segmentation cues than other closely related languages. In support of this hypothesis, recent work has shown that the phonetic properties of Danish negatively affect online language processing in young Danish children. In this study, we used eye-tracking to investigate whether the challenges associated with processing Danish also affect how Danish-learning children between 24 and 35 months of age establish and learn novel label–object mappings. The children were presented with a series of novel mappings, either ostensively (one novel object presented alone on the screen) or ambiguously (one novel object presented together with a familiar one), through carrier phrases with different phonetic structures (more vs less opaque). Our results showed two main trends. First, Danish-learning children performed poorly on the task of mapping novel labels onto novel objects. Second, when learning did occur, accuracy was affected by the phonetic opacity of the speech stimuli. We suggest that this finding results from the interplay of a perceptually challenging speech input and a slower onset of early vocabulary experience, which in turn may delay the onset of word learning skills in Danish-learning children.

Words are often seen as the core representational units of language use, and the basic building blocks of language learning. Here, we provide novel empirical evidence for the role of multiword sequences in language learning by showing that, like words, multiword phrases show age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects. Words that are acquired earlier in childhood show processing advantages in adults on a variety of tasks. AoA effects highlight the role of words in the developing language system and illustrate the lasting impact of early-learned material on adult processing. Here, we show that such effects are not limited to single words: multiword phrases that are learned earlier in childhood are also easier to process in adulthood. In two reaction time studies, we show that adults respond faster to early-acquired phrases (categorized using corpus measures and subjective ratings) compared to later-acquired ones. The effect is not reducible to adult frequencies, plausibility, or lexical AoA. Like words, early-acquired phrases enjoy a privileged status in the adult language system. These findings further highlight the parallels between words and larger patterns, demonstrate the role of multiword units in learning, and provide novel support for models of language where units of varying sizes serve as building blocks for language.

Statistical learning (SL) involving sensitivity to distributional regularities in the environment has been suggested to be an important factor in many aspects of cognition, including language. However, the degree to which statistically-learned information is retained over time is not well understood. To establish whether or not learners are able to preserve such regularities over time, we examined performance on an artificial second language learning task both immediately after training and also at a follow-up session 2 weeks later. Participants were exposed to an artificial language (Brocanto2), half of them receiving simplified training items in which only 20% of sequences contained complex structures, whereas the other half were exposed to a training set in which 80% of the items were composed of complex sequences. Overall, participants showed signs of learning at the first session and retention at the second, but the degree of learning was affected by the nature of the training they received. Participants exposed to the simplified input outperformed those in the more complex training condition. A GLMM was used to model the relationship between stimulus properties and participants’ endorsement strategies across both sessions. The results indicate that participants in the complex training condition relied more on an item’s chunk strength than those in the simple training condition. Taken together, this set of findings shows that statistically learned regularities are retained over the course of 2 weeks. The results also demonstrate that training on input featuring simple items leads to improved learning and retention of grammatical regularities.

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support categorization when words are being segmented for the first time. We familiarized learners with continuous artificial speech comprising repetitions of target words, which were preceded by high-frequency marker words. Crucially, marker words distinguished targets into 2 distributionally defined categories. We measured learning with segmentation and categorization tests and compared performance against a control group that heard the artificial speech without these marker words (i.e., just the targets, with no cues for categorization). Participants segmented the target words from speech in both conditions, but critically when the marker words were present, they influenced acquisition of word-referent mappings in a subsequent transfer task, with participants demonstrating better early learning for mappings that were consistent (rather than inconsistent) with the distributional categories. We propose that high-frequency words may assist early grammatical categorization, while speech segmentation is still being learned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical learning (SL), sensitivity to probabilistic regularities in sensory input, has been widely implicated in cognitive and perceptual development. Little is known, however, about the underlying mechanisms of SL and whether they undergo developmental change. One way to approach these questions is to compare SL across perceptual modalities. While a decade of research has compared auditory and visual SL in adults, we present the first direct comparison of visual and auditory SL in infants (8–10 months). Learning was evidenced in both perceptual modalities but with opposite directions of preference: Infants in the auditory condition displayed a novelty preference, while infants in the visual condition showed a familiarity preference. Interpreting these results within the Hunter and Ames model (1988), where familiarity preferences reflect a weaker stage of encoding than novelty preferences, we conclude that there is weaker learning in the visual modality than the auditory modality for this age. In addition, we found evidence of different developmental trajectories across modalities: Auditory SL increased while visual SL did not change for this age range. The results suggest that SL is not an abstract, amodal ability; for the types of stimuli and statistics tested, we find that auditory SL precedes the development of visual SL and is consistent with recent work comparing SL across modalities in older children.\ud \ud

Sequential Learning by Touch, Vision, and Audition Christopher M. Conway (cmc82@cornell.edu) Morten H. Christiansen (mhc27@cornell.edu) Department of Psychology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Abstract We investigated the extent to which touch, vision, and audition are similar in the ways they mediate the processing of statistical regularities within sequential input. While previous research has examined statistical/sequential learning in the visual and auditory domains, few researchers have conducted rigorous comparisons across sensory modalities; in particular, the sense of touch has been virtually ignored in such research. Our data reveal commonalities between the ways in which these three modalities afford the learning of sequential information. However, the data also suggest that in terms of sequential learning, audition is superior to the other two senses. We discuss these findings in terms of whether statistical/sequential learning is likely to consist of a single, unitary mechanism or multiple, modality-constrained ones. Introduction The acquisition of statistical/sequential information from the environment appears to be involved in many learning situations, ranging from speech segmentation (Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996), to learning orthographic regularities of written words (Pacton, Perruchet, Fayol, & Cleeremans, 2001) to processing visual scenes (Fiser & Aslin, 2002). However, previous research, focusing exclusively on visual and auditory domains, has failed to investigate whether such learning can occur via touch. Perhaps more importantly, few studies have attempted directly to compare sequential learning as it occurs across the various sensory modalities. There are important reasons to pursue such avenues of study. First, a common assumption is that statistical/sequential learning is a broad, domain- general ability (e.g., Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002). But in order to adequately assess this hypothesis, systematic experimentation across the modalities is necessary. If differences exist between sequential learning in the various senses, it may reflect the operation of multiple mechanisms, rather than a single process. Second, in regards to the touch modality in particular, prior research has generally focused on low- level perception; discovering that the sense of touch can accommodate complex sequential learning may have important implications for tactile communication systems. This paper describes three experiments conducted with the aim to assess sequential learning in three sensory modalities: touch, vision, and audition. Experiment 1 provides the first direct evidence for a fairly complex tactile sequential learning capability. Experiment 2 provides a visual analogue of Experiment 1 and suggests commonalities between visual and tactile sequential learning. Finally, Experiment 3 assesses the auditory domain, revealing an auditory advantage for sequential processing. We conclude by discussing these results in relation to basic issues of cognitive and neural organization—namely, to what extent sequential learning consists of a single or multiple mechanisms. Sequential Learning We define sequential learning as an ability to encode and represent the order of discrete elements occurring in a sequence (Conway & Christiansen, 2001). Importantly, we consider a crucial aspect of sequential learning to be the acquisition of statistical regularities occurring among sequence elements. Artificial grammar learning (AGL; Reber, 1967) is a widely used paradigm for studying such sequential learning 1 . AGL experiments typically use finite-state grammars to generate the stimuli; in such grammars, a transition from one state to the next produces an element of the sequence. For example, in the grammar of Figure 1, the path begins at the left-most node, labeled S1. The next transition can lead to either S 2 or S3. Every time a number is encountered in the transition between states, it is added as the next element of the sequence, producing a sequence corresponding to the rules of the grammar. For example, by passing through the nodes S1, S2, S2, S4, S3, S5, the “legal” sequence 4-1-3-5-2 is generated. During a training phase, participants typically are exposed to a subset of legal sequences—often under the guise of a “memory experiment” or some other such task—with the intent that they will incidentally encode structural aspects of the stimuli. Next, they are tested on whether they can classify novel sequences as In the typical AGL task, the stimulus elements are presented simultaneously (e.g., letter strings)—rather than sequentially (i.e., one element at a time). We consider even the former case to be a sequential learning task because scanning strings of letters generally occurs in a left-to-right, sequential manner. However, our aim here is to create a truly sequential learning environment using temporally-distributed input.

published Online First October 3, 2019 Statistical learning (SL) is involved in a wide range of basic and higher-order cognitive functions and is taken to be an important building block of virtually all current theories of information processing. In the last 2 decades, a large and continuously growing research community has therefore focused on the ability to extract embedded patterns of regularity in time and space. This work has mostly focused on transitional probabilities, in vision, audition, by newborns, children, adults, in normal developing and clinical populations. Here we appraise this research approach and we critically assess what it has achieved, what it has not, and why it is so. We then center on present SL research to examine whether it has adopted novel perspectives. These discussions lead us to outline possible blueprints for a novel research agenda. This article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (project 692502-L2STAT) under the Horizon2020 research and innovation program, and by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 217/14), awarded to Ram Frost. Blair C. Armstrong was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering (NSERC) Discovery Grant (2017– 06310). Morten H. Christiansen was supported in part by the Danish Council for Independent Research (FKK-Grant DFF-7013–00074).

Are comprehension and production a single, integrated skill, or are they separate processes drawing on a shared abstract knowledge of language? We argue that a fundamental constraint on memory, the Now-or-Never bottleneck, implies that language processing is incremental and that language learning occurs on-line. These properties are difficult to reconcile with the ‘abstract knowledge’ viewpoint, and crucially suggest that language comprehension and production are facets of a unitary skill. This viewpoint is exemplified in the Chunk-Based Learner, a computational acquisition model that processes incrementally and learns on-line. The model both parses and produces language; and implements the idea that language acquisition is nothing more than learning to process. We suggest that the Now-or-Never bottleneck also provides a strong motivation for unified perception–production models in other domains of communication and cognition.

Structured sequence processing tasks inform us about statistical learning abilities that are relevant to many areas of cognition, including language. Despite the ubiquity of these abilities across different tasks and cognitive domains, recent research in humans has demonstrated that these cognitive capacities do not represent a single, domain-general system, but are subject to modality-specific and stimulus-specific constraints. Sequence processing studies in nonhuman primates have provided initial insights into the evolution of these abilities. However, few studies have examined similarities and/or differences in sequence learning across sensory modalities. We review how behavioural and neuroimaging experiments assess sequence processing abilities across sensory modalities, and how these tasks could be implemented in nonhuman primates to better understand the evolution of these cognitive systems.

Language acquisition researchers have often viewed children as ‘mini-linguists,’ attempting to infer abstract knowledge of language from exposure to their native language. From this perspective, the challenge of acquisition can seem so formidable that meeting it would appear to require that much of this knowledge must be built-in, as a language instinct or universal grammar. From this viewpoint, language acquisition is also disconnected from language processing, and from the acquisition of other learned perceptuo-motor or cognitive abilities. This paper explores a recent alternative viewpoint, the ‘language-as-skill’ framework, according to which the child's challenge is practical, not theoretical: the child learns to understand and produce the language from practicing conversational interactions. Language acquisition can thus be seen as a type of skill acquisition, using similar mechanisms to those involved in learning to ride a bicycle, play a musical instrument, or draw a picture; and the need to acquire knowledge of the abstract structure of language is dissolved. This perspective takes the pressure off biological adaptation as the primary driver of language evolution, emphasizing instead the cultural evolution of linguistic structure.

Humans differ in innumerable ways, with considerable variation observable at every level of description, from the molecular to the social. Traditionally, linguistic and psycholinguistic theory has downplayed the possibility of meaningful differences in language across individuals. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is significant variation among speakers at any age as well as across the lifespan. Here, we review recent research in psycholinguistics, and argue that a focus on individual differences (IDs) provides a crucial source of evidence that bears strongly upon core issues in theories of the acquisition and processing of language; specifically, the role of experience in language acquisition, processing, and attainment, and the architecture of the language system.

Intuitively, the accuracy of initial word-referent mappings should be positively correlated with the outcome of learning. Yet recent evidence suggests an inverse effect of initial accuracy in adults, whereby greater accuracy of initial mappings is associated with poorer outcomes in a cross-situational learning task. Here, we examine the impact of initial accuracy on 4-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults. For half of the participants most word-referent mappings were initially correct and for the other half most mappings were initially incorrect. Initial accuracy was positively related to learning outcomes in 4-year-olds, had no effect on 10-year-olds' learning, and was inversely related to learning outcomes in adults. Examination of item learning patterns revealed item interdependence for adults and 4-year-olds but not 10-year-olds. These findings point to a qualitative change in language learning processes over development.

When children learn their native language, they have to deal with a confusing array of dependencies between various elements in an utterance. The dependent elements may be adjacent to one another or separated by intervening material. Prior studies suggest that nonadjacent dependencies are hard to learn when the intervening material has little variability, which may be due to a trade-off between adjacent and nonadjacent learning. In this study, we investigate the statistical learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies under low intervening variability using a modified serial reaction time (SRT) task. Young adults were trained on mixed sets of materials comprising equally probable adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. Offline tests administered after training showed better performance for adjacent than nonadjacent dependencies. However, online SRT data indicated that the participants developed sensitivity to both types of dependencies during training, with no significant differences between dependency types. The results demonstrate the value of online measures of learning and suggest that adjacent and nonadjacent learning can occur together even when there is low variability in the intervening material.

Statistical learning is typically considered to be a domain-general mechanism by which cognitive systems discover the underlying distributional properties of the input. Recent studies examining whether there are commonalities in the learning of distributional information across different domains or modalities consistently reveal, however, modality and stimulus specificity. An important question is, therefore, how and why a hypothesized domain-general learning mechanism systematically produces such effects. We offer a theoretical framework according to which statistical learning is not a unitary mechanism, but a set of domain-general computational principles, that operate in different modalities and therefore are subject to the specific constraints characteristic of their respective brain regions. This framework offers testable predictions and we discuss its computational and neurobiological plausibility.

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) causes anxiolytic- and antidepressant-like effects after central administration in rodents. These effects could theoretically be utilized in future gene therapy for anxiety and depression using viral vectors for induction of overexpression of NPY in specific brain regions. Using a recombinant adeno-associated viral (rAAV) vector, we addressed this idea by testing effects on anxiolytic- and depression-like behaviours in adult mice after overexpression of NPY transgene in the amygdala and/or hippocampus, two brain regions implicated in emotional behaviours. In the amygdala, injections of rAAV-NPY caused significant anxiolytic-like effect in the open field, elevated plus maze, and light-dark transition tests. In the hippocampus, rAAV-NPY treatment was associated with anxiolytic-like effect only in the elevated plus maze. No additive effect was observed after combined rAAV-NPY injection into both the amygdala and hippocampus where anxiolytic-like effect was found in the elevated plus maze and light-dark transition tests. Antidepressant-like effects were not detected in any of the rAAV-NPY injected groups. Immobility was even increased in the tail suspension and forced swim tests after intra-amygdaloid rAAV-NPY. Taken together, the present data show that rAAV-NPY treatment may confer non-additive anxiolytic-like effect after injection into the amygdala or hippocampus, being most pronounced in the amygdala.

Human language is composed of sequences of reusable elements. The origins of the sequential structure of language is a hotly debated topic in evolutionary linguistics. In this paper, we show that sets of sequences with language-like statistical properties can emerge from a process of cultural evolution under pressure from chunk-based memory constraints. We employ a novel experimental task that is non-linguistic and non-communicative in nature, in which participants are trained on and later asked to recall a set of sequences one-by-one. Recalled sequences from one participant become training data for the next participant. In this way, we simulate cultural evolution in the laboratory. Our results show a cumulative increase in structure, and by comparing this structure to data from existing linguistic corpora, we demonstrate a close parallel between the sets of sequences that emerge in our experiment and those seen in natural language.

Published 21 November 2016 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1711/20160059 In recent years, statistical learning (SL) research has seen a growing interest in tracking individual performance in SL tasks, mainly as a predictor of linguistic abilities. We review studies from this line of research and outline three presuppositions underlying the experimental approach they employ: (i) that SL is a unified theoretical construct; (ii) that current SL tasks are interchangeable, and equally valid for assessing SL ability; and (iii) that performance in the standard forced-choice test in the task is a good proxy of SL ability. We argue that these three critical presuppositions are subject to a number of theoretical and empirical issues. First, SL shows patterns of modality- and informational-specificity, suggesting that SL cannot be treated as a unified construct. Second, different SL tasks may tap into separate sub-components of SL that are not necessarily interchangeable. Third, the commonly used forced-choice tests in most SL tasks are subject to inherent limitations and confounds. As a first step, we offer a methodological approach that explicitly spells out a potential set of different SL dimensions, allowing for better transparency in choosing a specific SL task as a predictor of a given linguistic outcome. We then offer possible methodological solutions for better tracking and measuring SL ability. Taken together, these discussions provide a novel theoretical and methodological approach for assessing individual differences in SL, with clear testable predictions. This article is part of the themed issue ‘New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences’. This article was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 217/14, awarded to R.F.), by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant Nos. RO1 HD 067364, awarded to Ken Pugh and R.F., and PO1-HD 01994, awarded to Haskins Laboratories), and by the ERC (project 692502, awarded to R.F.). L.B. is a research fellow of the Fyssen Foundation.

Previous studies have indicated that dependencies between nonadjacent elements can be acquired by statistical learning when each element predicts only one other element (deterministic dependencies). The present study investigates statistical learning of probabilistic nonadjacent dependencies, in which each element predicts several other elements with a certain probability, as is more common in natural language. Three artificial language learning experiments compared statistical learning of deterministic and probabilistic nonadjacent dependencies. In Experiment 1, participants listened to sequences of three non-words containing either deterministic or probabilistic dependencies between the first and the last non-words. Participants exposed to deterministic dependencies subsequently distinguished correct sequences from sequences that violated the nonadjacent dependencies; participants exposed to probabilistic dependencies did not. However, when visual (Experiment 2) and phonological cues (Experiment 3) were added participants learned both kinds of dependencies, demonstrating statistical learning of probabilistic nonadjacent dependencies when additional cues are present.

Accounts of individual differences in online language processing ability often focus on the explanatory utility of verbal working memory, as measured by reading span tasks. Although variability in reading span task performance likely reflects individual differences in multiple underlying traits, skills, and processes, accumulating evidence suggests that reading span scores also reflect variability in the linguistic experiences of an individual. Here, through an individual differences approach, we first demonstrate that reading span scores correlate significantly with measures of the amount of experience an individual has had with written language (gauged by measures that provide “proxy estimates” of print exposure). We then explore the relationship between reading span scores and online language processing ability. Individuals with higher reading spans demonstrated greater sensitivity to violations of statistical regularities found in natural language—as evinced by higher reading times (RTs) on the disambiguating region of garden-path sentences—relative to their lower span counterparts. This result held after statistically controlling for individual differences in a non-linguistic operation span task. Taken together, these results suggest that accounts of individual differences in sentence processing can benefit from a stronger focus on experiential factors, especially when considered in relation to variability in perceptual and learning abilities that influence the amount of benefit gleaned from such experience.

Implicit statistical learning (ISL) is exclusive to neither a particular sensory modality nor a single domain of processing. Even so, differences in perceptual processing may substantially affect learning across modalities. In three experiments, statistically equivalent auditory and visual familiarizations were presented under different timing conditions that either facilitated or disrupted temporal processing (fast or slow presentation rates). We find an interaction of rate and modality of presentation: At fast rates, auditory ISL was superior to visual. However, at slow presentation rates, the opposite pattern of results was found: Visual ISL was superior to auditory. Thus, we find that changes to presentation rate differentially affect ISL across sensory modalities. Additional experiments confirmed that this modality-specific effect was not due to cross-modal interference or attentional manipulations. These findings suggest that ISL is rooted in modality-specific, perceptually based processes.

Although statistical learning and language have been assumed to be intertwined, this theoretical presupposition has rarely been tested empirically. The present study investigates the relationship between statistical learning and language using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered separate statistical learning tasks involving adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies, along with a language comprehension task and a battery of other measures assessing verbal working memory, short-term memory, vocabulary, reading experience, cognitive motivation, and fluid intelligence. Strong interrelationships were found among statistical learning, verbal working memory, and language comprehension. However, when the effects of all other factors were controlled for, performance on the two statistical learning tasks was the only predictor for comprehending relevant types of natural language sentences.

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.'s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category, phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words.

Previous research on lexical development has aimed to identify the factors that enable accurate initial word-referent mappings based on the assumption that the accuracy of initial word-referent associations is critical for word learning. The present study challenges this assumption. Adult English speakers learned an artificial language within a cross-situational learning paradigm. Visual fixation data were used to assess the direction of visual attention. Participants whose longest fixations in the initial trials fell more often on distracter images performed significantly better at test than participants whose longest fixations fell more often on referent images. Thus, inaccurate initial word-referent mappings may actually benefit learning.

Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior. A speaker's behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual constraints to social motivations. The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive mechanisms. The CAS approach reveals commonalities in many areas of language research, including first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language evolution, and computational modeling.

Most current approaches to linguistic structure suggest that language is recursive, that recursion is a fundamental property of grammar, and that independent performance constraints limit recursive abilities that would otherwise be infinite. This article presents a usage-based perspective on recursive sentence processing, in which recursion is construed as an acquired skill and in which limitations on the processing of recursive constructions stem from interactions between linguistic experience and intrinsic constraints on learning and processing. A connectionist model embodying this alternative theory is outlined, along with simulation results showing that the model is capable of constituent-like generalizations and that it can fit human data regarding the differential processing difficulty associated with center-embeddings in German and cross-dependencies in Dutch. Novel predictions are furthermore derived from the model and corroborated by the results of four behavioral experiments, suggesting that acquired recursive abilities are intrinsically bounded not only when processing complex recursive constructions, such as center-embedding and cross-dependency, but also during processing of the simpler, right- and left-recursive structures.

Across a wide range of tasks, vision appears to process input best when it is spatially rather than temporally distributed, whereas audition is the opposite. Here we explored whether such modality constraints also affect implicit statistical learning in an artificial grammar learning task. Participants were exposed to statistically governed input sequences and then tested on their ability to classify novel items. We explored three types of presentation formats*visual input distributed spatially, visual input distributed temporally, auditory input distributed temporally*and two rates of presentation: moderate (4 elements/second) and fast (8 elements/second). Overall, learning abilities were best for visual-spatial and auditory input. Additionally, at the faster presentation rate, performance declined only for the visual-temporal condition. Finally, auditory learning was mediated by increased sensitivity to the endings of input sequences, whereas vision was most sensitive to the beginnings of sequences. These results suggest that statistical learning for sequential and spatial patterns proceeds differently across the visual and auditory modalities.

Two studies examined the role of phonological cues in the lexical categorization of new words when children could also rely on learning by exclusion and whether the role of phonology depends on extensive experience with a language. Phonological cues were assessed via phonological typicality – an aggregate measure of the relationship between the phonology of a word and the phonology of words in the same lexical class. Experiment 1 showed that when monolingual English-speaking seven-year-olds could rely on learning by exclusion, phonological typicality only affected their initial inferences about the words. Consistent with recent computational analyses, phonological cues had stronger impact on the processing of verb-like than noun-like items. Experiment 2 revealed an impact of French on the performance of seven-year-olds in French immersion when tested in a French language environment. Thus, phonological knowledge may affect lexical categorization even in the absence of extensive experience.

Our target article argued that a genetically specified Universal Grammar (UG), capturing arbitrary properties of languages, is not tenable on evolutionary grounds, and that the close fit between language and language learners arises because language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse. Few commentaries defend a genetically specified UG. Some commentators argue that we underestimate the importance of processes of cultural transmission; some propose additional cognitive and brain mechanisms that may constrain language and perhaps differentiate humans from nonhuman primates; and others argue that we overstate or understate the case against co-evolution of language genes. In engaging with these issues, we suggest that a new synthesis concerning the relationship between brains, genes, and language may be emerging.

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable framework for testing the role of experience in sentence processing: if frequency of exposure influences processing difficulty, highly frequent pronominal object relatives should be easier to process but only when a personal pronoun is in the embedded position. We tested this hypothesis experimentally: We conducted four self-paced reading tasks, which indicated that differences in pronominal object/subject relative processing mirrored the pattern of distribution revealed by the corpus analysis. We discuss the results in the light of current theories of sentence comprehension. We conclude that object relative processing is facilitated by frequency of the embedded clause, and, more generally, that statistical information should be taken into account by theories of relative clause processing.

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities. Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language. Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure. Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty.

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form-to-meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development, and communication: systematicity facilitates category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help to explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure. The principle of arbitrariness accounts only partly for attested form-to-meaning correspondences in the vocabularies of the languages of the world. Recent research has uncovered substantial patterns of non-arbitrariness in language.Two common forms of non-arbitrariness are iconicity and systematicity, each with complementary advantages in learning and communication.A fully arbitrary vocabulary is unlikely to be a stable feature of natural languages, because form-to-meaning correspondences are shaped by cultural evolutionary processes which favour not just discriminability but also learnability and communicative utility.

This study examined whether musical training, ethnicity, and experience with a natural tone language influenced sensitivity to tone while listening to an artificial tone language. The language was designed with three tones, modeled after level-tone African languages. Participants listened to a 15-min random concatenation of six 3-syllable words. Sensitivity to tone was assessed using minimal pairs differing only in one syllable (nonword task: e.g.,to-kà-sucompared toca-fí-to) or only in tone (tone task: e.g.,to-kà-sucompared toto-ká-su). Proficiency in an East Asian heritage language was the strongest predictor of success on the tone task. Asians without tone language experience were no better than other ethnic groups. We conclude by considering implications for research on second language learning, especially as approached through artificial language learning.

The Earth Science Storybook Project is being conducted with Brigham Young University's (BYU) Physical Science 110B (PS 110B) class, which is introductory geology for Elementary Education majors. Under the project, preservice elementary teachers in PS 110B are mentored by university geology faculty and geology graduate students as they author children's storybooks in earth science. The storybooks are then illustrated and made available to practicing teachers for classroom use. This is done by an interdisciplinary collaborative effort between the BYU Geology Department and the BYU Visual Arts Department, which is providing senior illustration students to illustrate the storybooks at a relatively low cost. The goal is to use the mentored writing experience as a means of improving geology content knowledge for preservice elementary teachers and fostering their positive attitudes and self-efficacy toward learning and teaching science. These goals are being assessed by (1) quantitative analysis of the PS 110B c...

Contains fulltext : 35205.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder, starting in early childhood and persisting into adulthood in the majority of cases. Family and twin studies have demonstrated the importance of genetic factors and candidate gene association studies have identified several loci that exert small but significant effects on ADHD. To provide further clarification of reported associations and identify novel associated genes, we examined 1,038 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning 51 candidate genes involved in the regulation of neurotransmitter pathways, particularly dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin pathways, in addition to circadian rhythm genes. Analysis used within family tests of association in a sample of 776 DSM-IV ADHD combined type cases ascertained for the International Multi-centre ADHD Gene project. We found nominal significance with one or more SNPs in 18 genes, including the two most replicated findings in the literature: DRD4 and DAT1. Gene-wide tests, adjusted for the number of SNPs analysed in each gene, identified associations with TPH2, ARRB2, SYP, DAT1, ADRB2, HES1, MAOA and PNMT. Further studies will be needed to confirm or refute the observed associations and their generalisability to other samples.

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses of child-directed speech showing that there is indirect statistical information useful for correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives and that such information is sufficient for distinguishing between grammatical and ungrammatical generalizations, even in the absence of direct evidence. We further show that there are simple learning devices, such as neural networks, capable of exploiting such statistical cues, producing a bias toward correct AUX questions when compared to their ungrammatical counterparts. The results suggest that the basic assumptions of the poverty of stimulus argument may need to be reappraised.

M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter’s (1992) capacity theory of comprehension posits a linguistic working memory functionally separated from the representation of linguistic knowledge. G. S. Waters and D. Caplan’s (1996) critique of this approach retained the notion of a separate working memory. In this article, the authors present an alternative account motivated by a connectionist approach to language comprehension. In their view, processing capacity emerges from network architecture and experience and is not a primitive that can vary independently. Individual differences in comprehension do not stem from variations in a separate working memory capacity; instead they emerge from an interaction of biological factors and language experience. This alternative is argued to provide a superior account of comprehension results previously attributed to a separate working memory capacity. The concept of a working memory resource or capacity for temporary storage and manipulation of information has played an important role in many theories of cognition, particularly theories of language processing (e.g., Baddeley, 1986; Engle, Cantor, & Carullo, 1992; Just & Carpenter, 1992). The particular approach advocated by Just and Carpenter (1992) is one in which linguistic working memory capacity directly constrains the operation of language comprehension processes, and that variation in the capacity of linguistic working memory within the normal population is a primary source of individual differences in language comprehension. Just and Carpenter further suggest that reductions in working memory capacity in aging can explain reduced language comprehension and production abilities among normal elderly adults and that aphasic patients’ language comprehension deficits following brain injury may be explained by a deficit in working memory capacity rather than by a loss of linguistic knowledge (Miyake, Carpenter, & Just, 1994). Just and Carpenter’s work has been extremely successful in emphasizing the importance of individual differences in language research, but their approach is not without controversy. Criticisms of their claims have taken several forms. Waters and Caplan (1996) suggested that there are at least two different working memory capacities that subserve language use, and they have sharply criticized the data that Just and Carpenter interpreted in support of a single working memory capacity (see also Caplan & Waters, 1999b; cf. Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996). Similarly, several aphasia researchers have suggested that a reduction of working memory capacity is not an adequate description of these

Interocular-switch rivalry (also known as stimulus rivalry) is a kind of binocular rivalry in which two rivalrous images are swapped between the eyes several times a second. The result is stable periods of one image and then the other, with stable intervals that span many eye swaps (Logothetis, Leopold, & Sheinberg, 1996). Previous work used this close kin of binocular rivalry with rivalrous forms. Experiments here test whether chromatic interocular-switch rivalry, in which the swapped stimuli differ in only chromaticity, results in slow alternation between two colors. Swapping equiluminant rivalrous chromaticities at 3.75 Hz resulted in slow perceptual color alternation, with one or the other color often continuously visible for two seconds or longer (during which there were 15+ eye swaps). A well-known theory for sustained percepts from interocular-switch rivalry with form is inhibitory competition between binocular neurons driven by monocular neurons with matched orientation tuning in each eye; such binocular neurons would produce a stable response when a given orientation is swapped between the eyes. A similar model can account for the percepts here from chromatic interocular-switch rivalry and is underpinned by the neurophysiological finding that color-preferring binocular neurons are driven by monocular neurons from each eye with well-matched chromatic selectivity (Peirce, Solomon, Forte, & Lennie, 2008). In contrast to chromatic interocular-switch rivalry, luminance interocular-switch rivalry with swapped stimuli that differ in only luminance did not result in slowly alternating percepts of different brightnesses.

Recent advances in the field of statistical learning have established that learners are able to track regularities of multimodal stimuli, yet it is unknown whether the statistical computations are performed on integrated representations or on separate, unimodal representations. In the present study, we investigated the ability of adults to integrate audio and visual input during statistical learning. We presented learners with a speech stream synchronized with a video of a speaker’s face. In the critical condition, the visual (e.g., /gi/) and auditory (e.g., /mi/) signals were occasionally incongruent, which we predicted would produce the McGurk illusion, resulting in the perception of an audiovisual syllable (e.g., /ni/). In this way, we used the McGurk illusion to manipulate the underlying statistical structure of the speech streams, such that perception of these illusory syllables facilitated participants’ ability to segment the speech stream. Our results therefore demonstrate that participants can integrate audio and visual input to perceive the McGurk illusion during statistical learning. We interpret our findings as support for modality-interactive accounts of statistical learning.

Being able to track dependencies between syntactic elements separated by other constituents is crucial for language acquisition and processing (e.g., in subject-noun/verb agreement). Although long assumed to require language-specific machinery, research on statistical learning has suggested that domain-general mechanisms may support the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies. In this study, we investigated whether individuals with specific language impairment (SLI)—who have problems with long-distance dependencies in language—also have problems with statistical learning of non-adjacent relations. The results confirmed this hypothesis, indicating that statistical learning may subserve the acquisition and processing of long-distance dependencies in natural language.

Spatial features of an object can be specified using two different response types: either by use of symbols or motorically by directly acting upon the object. Is this response dichotomy reflected in a dual representation of the visual world: one for perception and one for action? Previously, symbolic and motoric responses, specifying location, has been shown to rely on a common representation. What about more elaborate features such as length and orientation? Here we show that when motoric and symbolic responses are made within the same trial, the probability of making the same symbolic and motoric response is well above chance for both length and orientation. This suggests that motoric and symbolic responses to length and orientation are driven by a common representation. We also show that, for both response types, the spatial features of an object are processed independently. This finding of matching object-processing characteristics is also in agreement with the idea of a common representation driving both response types.