City Research Online

Abstract

Statistical learning is a mechanism for detecting associations among co-occurring elements in many domains and species. A key controversy is whether it leads to memory for discrete chunks composed of these associated elements, or merely to pairwise associations among elements. Critical evidence for the mere-association view comes from the “phantom-word” phenomenon, where learners recognize statistically coherent but unattested items better than actually presented items with weaker internal associations, suggesting that they prioritize pair-wise associations over memories for discrete units. However, this phenomenon has only been demonstrated for sequentially presented stimuli, but not for simultaneously presented visual shapes, where learners might prioritize discrete units over pair-wise associations. Here, I ask whether the phantom-word phenomenon can be observed with simultaneously presented visual shapes. Learners were familiarized with scenes combining two triplets of visual shapes (hereafter “words”). They were then tested on their recognition of these words vs. part-words (attested items with weaker internal associations), of phantom-words (unattested items with strong internal associations) vs. part-words, and of words vs. phantom-words. Learners preferred both words and phantom-words over part-words and showed no preference for words over phantom-words. This suggests that, as for sequentially input, statistical learning in simultaneously presented shapes leads primarily to pair-wise associations rather than to memories for discrete chunks. However, as, in some analyses, the preference for words over part-words was slightly higher than for phantom-words over part-words, the results do not rule out that, for simultaneous presented items, learners might have some limited sensitivity to frequency of occurrence.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Statistical Learning; Declarative Memory; Language Acquisition; Hebbian Learning
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HA Statistics
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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