Statistical learning of adjacent and non-adjacent pairs in non-linguistic short sequences

Description

The ability to learn adjacent and non-adjacent pairs is central in language processing. However, current evidence indicates that adjacent and non-adjacent pairs are not equally learnable. The present study investigated the role of transitional probabilities during the learning of adjacent and non-adjacent pairs appearing in non-linguistic short sequences. Participants were exposed to four sequences of three stimuli ABC repeated randomly during the experiment, with each stimulus corresponding to a given position of a dot on a touchscreen. In the first experiment the transition BC of the triplet ABC was predictable while the first transition AB was unpredictable. The second experiment required the learning of the fully predictable non-adjacent pair AC while the transitions AB and BC were unpredictable. The results showed that participants learned adjacent pairs and had greater difficulty to learn the non-adjacent pairs. These data provide additional constraints for modeling statistical learning mechanisms.

Abstract

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