Exploring and exploiting uncertainty: Statistical learning ability affects how we learn to process language along multiple dimensions of experience

We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults’ performance on a serial reaction time task and a self-paced reading task we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers’ knowledge of linguistic co-occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content-specific and task-general information.

First, we investigated the extent to which an individual’s pattern learning correlates with their sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co-occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content-sensitive learners in that the more probable the co-occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be.