Peer-reviewed article
The Contributions of Statistical Learning to L2 Morphosyntax Processing Across Visual and Auditory Modalities in Chinese Adolescent Learners.
Song K, Yan W, Yang G, Huang Y, Yu H et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed study examines how statistical learning abilities relate to second language grammar processing in Chinese adolescent English learners. It compares learning across visual and auditory modalities using reading and listening tasks. The research found that visual statistical learning showed some association with reading comprehension, but results were inconsistent and not confirmed in follow-up analyses.
Key points
- Visual statistical learning accuracy was positively associated with grammatical sensitivity in reading, but this finding was not confirmed in sensitivity analysis
- Participants performed better on visual statistical learning tasks than auditory ones
- No significant associations were found between auditory statistical learning and listening comprehension
- Working memory and attention did not show consistent independent contributions to L2 processing
- The study extends individual differences research to adolescent classroom learners rather than adult populations
Limitations
This is a cognitive science study focused on language processing mechanisms rather than child well-being outcomes. It does not evaluate an intervention designed to improve child welfare, health, protection, or development in the sense relevant to child studies.
Abstract
Individual differences in statistical learning (SL) constitute an important cognitive mechanism that supports second language (L2) syntactic processing. However, existing research has primarily focused on adult populations, while potential differences across input modalities remain understudied. This study investigated the associations between SL and implicit L2 morphosyntactic processing among Chinese adolescent English learners, comparing results across visual and auditory modalities. Participants completed visual and auditory SL tasks, self-paced reading (SPR), self-paced listening (SPL), as well as working memory (WM) and attention tasks. L2 morphosyntactic processing ability was measured via grammatical sensitivity indicators extracted from SPR and SPL data. Mixed-effects analyses did not detect statistically reliable group-level grammaticality effects in either task, though SPR exhibited a descriptive pattern where ungrammatical sentences elicited longer reading times at the third word. Participants achieved higher accuracy on the visual SL task than the auditory one. In exploratory regression analyses, visual SL accuracy was found to positively predict grammatical sensitivity measured at Word 3 in SPR. Still, this association was not confirmed in a follow-up sensitivity analysis. No corresponding significant association was observed between auditory SL and SPL sensitivity, and neither working memory nor attention showed consistent independent contributions to the outcome. These findings extend individual-differences research on this topic to adolescent classroom L2 learners and underscore the potentially important role of visual regularity learning in online L2 reading processing.