Language production and implicit statistical learning in typical development and children with acquired language disorders: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

Statistical properties of language provide important cues for language learning and may be processed by domain-general cognitive systems. We investigated the relationship between implicit statistical learning (the unconscious detection of statistical regularities in input) and language production. Twenty typically developing (TD) children and nine children with acquired language disorders (ALD) (aged 6–18 years) took part in a Boston Cookie Theft picture description task. Using a computerized analysis, we investigated statistical properties, such as usage frequency of words and collocation strength of word combinations. Participants also completed a non-linguistic serial reaction time (SRT) task, which tested non-verbal, implicit statistical learning in the visual-motor modality. We determined age effects, and compared language production and SRT performance between both groups. Older TD children produced more connected language, more words, less frequent function words, more rare or novel combinations, and showed better statistical learning. Children with ALD produced less connected language, more weakly collocated combinations, displayed less lexical diversity and showed poorer statistical learning. Post-hoc analyses found correlations between statistical learning and statistical properties of spoken language. Given the rarity and heterogeneity of children with ALD, group size was small and the study should be considered exploratory. However, we note that results are compatible with the view that language production draws on statistical learning and that impairment of statistical learning can be related to language disorders.

KEYWORDS:

• Acquired language disorder
• typical development
• paediatric
• language production
• sequential learning

Acknowledgements

The manuscript is based on a dissertation project by Mok Xue Ting, Joelle, supervised by Vitor Zimmerer and Rosemary Varley. The project was conceived by Vitor Zimmerer and Mok Xue Ting, Joelle. Methods were designed by Vitor Zimmerer, Mok Xue Ting, Joelle, Rosemary Varley and James Douglas Saddy, and the recruitment was carried out by Mok Xue Ting, Joelle and Goh Siew Li. Data collection was carried out by Mok Xue Ting, Joelle. Data analysis was conducted by Mok Xue Ting, Joelle and Vitor Zimmerer. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Mok Xue Ting, Joelle and Vitor Zimmerer. Rosemary Varley contributed to further drafts. We would like to thank all the participants and their parent(s)/guardian(s) for their time in participating in this study. We would also like to thank Leo Wei Zhi, for helping in recruitment of the patients, as well as Elizabeth Wonnacott and Courtenay Norbury for helpful comments when this work was presented at a lab meeting. We also thank our anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).