Limor Raviv

The Developmental Trajectory of Children's Auditory and Visual Statistical Learning Abilities: Modality-Based Differences in the Effect of Age.

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks and across modalities (e.g., auditory, visual), raising questions on the domain generality of SL. However, while SL is well established for infants and adults, only little is known about its developmental trajectory during childhood, leaving two important questions unanswered: (1) Is SL an early-maturing capacity that is fully developed in infancy, or does it improve with age like other cognitive capacities (e.g., memory)? and (2) Will SL have similar developmental trajectories across modalities? Only few studies have looked at SL across development, with conflicting results: some find age-related improvements while others do not. Importantly, no study to date has examined auditory SL across childhood, nor compared it to visual SL to see if there are modality-based differences in the developmental trajectory of SL abilities. We addressed these issues by conducting a large-scale study of childrens performance on matching auditory and visual SL tasks across a wide age range (5-12y). Results show modality-based differences in the development of SL abilities: while childrens learning in the visual domain improved with age, learning in the auditory domain did not change in the tested age range. We examine these findings in light of previous studies and discuss their implications for modality-based differences in SL and for the role of auditory SL in language acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kg35hoF0pw.

The role of community size in the emergence of linguistic structure

Over the last decade, several diachronic and typological analyses showed that the structure of languages spoken in exoteric societies is different from the structure of languages spoken in esoteric societies (e.g., Lupyan & Dale, 2010; Meir, Israel, Sandler, Padden & Aronoff, 2012; Nettle, 2012; Trudgill, 2009; Wray & Grace, 2007). These studies propose that different linguistic structures may emerge in different communities depending on their social properties. In particular, it has been argued that increased population size, sparser community structure and higher proportion of adult L2 learners in the community lead to morphological simplification. However, these three community properties are confounded in the real world, making it hard to evaluate their role separately. Additionally, the role of community size has not been experimentally tested.