The effect of children’s prior knowledge and language abilities on their statistical learning

Abstract Statistical learning (SL) is assumed to lead long-term memory representations. However, the way that those representations influence future remains largely unknown. We studied how children’s existing distributional linguistic knowledge influences their subsequent SL on a serial recall task, in which 49 German-speaking seven- nine-year-old children repeated series of six-syllable sequences. These contained either (i) bisyllabic words based frequently occurring German syllable transitions (naturalistic sequences), (ii) created from unattested (non-naturalistic or (iii) random combinations (unstructured foils). Children demonstrated naturalistic sequences beginning experiment, indicating implicit traces derived input language informed very early stages onward. Exploratory analyses indicated with higher proficiency were more accurate repeating and improved most throughout study compared lower proficiency.