Hi! Here is the data, code, stimuli & presentation scripts, and results from our forthcoming paper on SL. Feel free to look around, and send me an email if you have any questions.
Statistical learning (SL) allows individuals to rapidly detect regularities in the sensory environment. We replicated previous findings showing that adult participants become sensitive to the implicit structure in a continuous speech stream of repeating tri-syllabic pseudowords within minutes, as measured by standard tests in the SL literature: a target detection task and a 2AFC word recognition task. Consistent with previous findings, we found only a weak correlation between these two measures of learning, leading us to question whether there is overlap between the information captured by these two tasks. Representational similarity analysis on reaction times measured during the target detection task revealed that reaction time data reflect sensitivity to transitional probability, triplet position, word grouping, and duplet pairings of syllables. However, individual performance on the word recognition task was not predicted by similarity measures derived for any of these four features. We conclude that online detection tasks provide richer and multi-faceted information about the SL process, as compared with 2AFC recognition tasks, and may be preferable for gaining insight into the dynamic aspects of SL.
Fig. 1. Implicit learning of a pseudo-language leads to rapid reactiom time facilitation for target syllables in predictable locations.Note that the Experiments 1 and 2 in the manuscript refer to "exp 3" and "exp 4", respectively, in the code.