Abstract：
Children are more successful language learners than adults, yet the nature and cause of this phenomenon are still not well understood. Auditory statistical learning from speech has been a prominent focus of research in the field of language development because it is regarded as a fundamental learning mechanism underlying word segmentation in early language acquisition. However, a handful of studies that investigated developmental trajectories for auditory statistical learning found no clear child advantages. The degree to which the learning task measures explicit rather than implicit mechanisms might obscure a potential advantage for younger learners, as suggested by recent findings. In the present study, we compared children aged 7-12 years and young adults on an adapted version of the task that disentangles explicit and implicit contributions to learning. They were exposed to a continuous stream of speech sounds comprising four repeating trisyllabic pseudowords. Learning of the hidden words was tested (a) online through a target-detection task and (b) offline via a forced-choice word recognition test that included a memory judgement procedure. Both measures revealed comparable learning abilities. However, children\'s performance on the recognition task showed evidence for both explicit and implicit word knowledge while adults appeared primarily sensitive to explicit memory. Since implicit memory is more stable in time than explicit memory, we suggest that future work should focus more on developmental differences in the nature of the memory that is formed, rather than the strength of learning, when trying to understand child advantages in language acquisition.
摘要：
儿童比成人更成功的语言学习者，然而，这种现象的性质和原因仍然没有得到很好的理解。语音的听觉统计学习一直是语言发展领域研究的重点，因为它被认为是早期语言习得中分词的基本学习机制。然而,少数调查听觉统计学习发展轨迹的研究没有发现明显的儿童优势。学习任务衡量显性而非隐性机制的程度可能会掩盖年轻学习者的潜在优势，正如最近的发现所暗示的那样。在本研究中,我们比较了7-12岁的儿童和年轻人在任务的改编版本中，该任务区分了对学习的显性和隐性贡献。他们暴露于连续的语音流，包括四个重复的三音节伪词。（a）通过目标检测任务在线测试隐藏单词的学习，（b）通过包含记忆判断程序的强制选择单词识别测试离线测试。两种措施都显示出可比的学习能力。然而,儿童在识别任务中的表现显示了显性和隐性单词知识的证据，而成年人对显性记忆主要敏感。由于内隐记忆在时间上比外显记忆更稳定，我们建议未来的工作应该更多地关注形成的记忆性质的发展差异，而不是学习的力量，当试图理解孩子在语言习得中的优势时。
