Modality and stimulus effects on distributional statistical learning: Sound vs. sight, time vs. space

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 138; p. 104531
• Main Authors: Zhou, Haoyu, van der Ham, Sabine, de Boer, Bart, Bogaerts, Louisa, Raviv, Limor
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.10.2024
• Subjects: Audition vs. Vision; Categories; Distributional learning; Frequency distribution; Modality-specificity; Statistical Learning; Distributional learning; Frequency distribution; Audition vs. Vision; Statistical Learning; Modality-specificity; Categories
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2024.104531

•We compared participants’ auditory and visual distributional statistical learning.•Temporal categories were better learned in auditory compared to visual modality.•Spatial categories were better learned in visual compared to auditory modality.•Learning outcomes were correlated only for the same modality or stimulus type.•Results suggest that distributional learning is modality- and stimulus- sensitive. Statistical learning (SL) is postulated to play an important role in the process of language acquisition as well as in other cognitive functions. It was found to enable learning of various types of statistical patterns across different sensory modalities. However, few studies have distinguished distributional SL (DSL) from sequential and spatial SL, or examined DSL across modalities using comparable tasks. Considering the relevance of such findings to the nature of SL, the current study investigated the modality- and stimulus-specificity of DSL. Using a within-subject design we compared DSL performance in auditory and visual modalities. For each sensory modality, two stimulus types were used: linguistic versus non-linguistic auditory stimuli and temporal versus spatial visual stimuli. In each condition, participants were exposed to stimuli that varied in their length as they were drawn from two categories (short versus long). DSL was assessed using a categorization task and a production task. Results showed that learners’ performance was only correlated for tasks in the same sensory modality. Moreover, participants were better at categorizing the temporal signals in the auditory conditions than in the visual condition, where in turn an advantage of the spatial condition was observed. In the production task participants exaggerated signal length more for linguistic signals than non-linguistic signals. Together, these findings suggest that DSL is modality- and stimulus-sensitive.