心理科学 ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (3): 599-608.DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250309

• 发展与教育 • 上一篇    下一篇

儿童早期统计学习的发展:听觉语言领域的优势

纪倩茹1,2, 李菲菲*1   

  1. 1浙江师范大学儿童发展与教育学院,杭州,311231;
    2江苏省盐城市响水县实验初级中学,盐城,224699
  • 出版日期:2025-05-20 发布日期:2025-05-30
  • 通讯作者: *李菲菲,E-mail: lifeifei1206@163.com

Development of Statistical Learning in Early Childhood: The Advantages of Auditory Linguistic Domain

Ji Qianru1,2, Li Feifei1   

  1. 1College of Child Development and Education, Zhejiang Normal University, Hangzhou, 311231;
    2Xiangshui Experimental Junior High School, Yancheng City, Yancheng, 224699
  • Online:2025-05-20 Published:2025-05-30

摘要: 目前,研究关于儿童早期语言领域的统计学习能力是否随年龄发展尚未得到一致的结论,且缺乏在相同实验参数下对不同领域和感觉通道统计学习早期发展的系统考察。研究选择中班到二年级5~8岁的儿童,首次系统地考察了早期听觉和视觉通道中语言和非语言领域统计学习的发展。儿童首先在熟悉阶段听或看由无意义三联体构成的声音流或图片流;接着在测验阶段对三联体和非三联体做二择一判断。结果发现:1.儿童对听觉音节材料的统计学习能力从5~6岁快速发展,并在6岁时达到了和8岁儿童相当的水平,表明在儿童早期听觉语言领域的统计学习存在发展优势;2.从6岁起,儿童已能对视觉文字材料进行统计学习,且无论是视觉文字、物品图片还是听觉环境声音材料,其统计学习成绩均随年龄增长而提高。这些结果说明统计学习可能既遵循某种领域一般的原则,又受到输入刺激特性的限制,是一种多成分的能力。

关键词: 儿童, 统计学习, 刺激类型, 感觉通道, 发展

Abstract: Abstract Statistical learning (SL) refers to the ability to extract structured regularities unintentionally from the environment. SL is a powerful learning mechanism of great significance to children’s development. However, studies have not yet reached consistent conclusions on the developmental trajectory of SL in different modalities and domains during childhood. Exploring this problem requires a systematic investigation under the same research framework and the same experimental stimulus parameters. Children at 5~8 years of age are in the transition period from mastery of oral language to written language, providing a good window to investigate the development of VSL in the linguistic domain. Therefore, the present studies aim to systematically examine the developmental trajectory of SL in different modalities and domains, and to explore the nature of statistics learning mechanism that individuals possess in early childhood.
Children from the middle and senior grades of kindergarten, first and second grades of elementary school, aged 5~8 years, participated in the experiments. In Experiment 1, the participants were 96 typically developing children, with 24 children in each grade and gender being balanced. The materials contained 12 syllables and 12 environmental sounds, which were divided into 4 triplets (e.g., bà-pí-tū). During the familiarization phase, children were showed a stream of speech formed by the pseudo-random repetition of these meaningless triplets of syllables or sounds. The clue to identify the triplets from the speech stream is the transitional probabilities (TPs) (e.g., within the triplet bà-pí-tū of the speech, the TPs of bà-pí and pí-tū are both 1). During the testing phase, children were showed triplets (e.g., bà-pí-tū, TP = 1) and non-triplets (e.g., bà-pá-dā, TP = 0) that they had never heard before and asked to complete a two-alternative forced-choice task. In Experiment 2, the participants were another 96 children, with grade and gender being balanced. The materials and experiment procedures were almost the same as those of Experiment 1, except that the 12 syllables or 12 environmental sounds were replaced by 12 pictures of objects or 12 Chinese characters which were visually presented, e.g., 出-个-而. All the stimuli in two experiments were showed 500ms each, with a 250ms interval between the stimuli.
In Experiment 1, one-sample t-test showed that for linguistic materials, the accuracy of senior, first, and second grade was significantly higher than chance level .50 (ps < .001), while for non-linguistic materials, only the accuracy of first and second grades was significantly higher than .50 (p < .05. p < .001) (see Figure 1). Generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) showed that (see Table 2): The interaction between stimulus type and grade (senior vs. second) was significant. Simple effect analysis showed further that there was no significant difference in the accuracy of linguistic materials between senior and second grade (β < .001, SE = .16, z = .003, p > .05); while the accuracy for senior class of non-linguistic materials was significantly lower than the second grade (β = -.54, SE = .16, z = -.07, p < .01). In Experiment 2, for linguistic materials, only the accuracy of first and second grade were significantly higher than .50 (ps < .01). While for non-linguistic materials, the accuracy of senior, first and second grades were significantly higher than .50 (ps < .01) (see Figure 3). GLMM showed that (see Table 4): The accuracy of the second grade was significantly higher than the senior grade. None of the interactions were significant. Taken together, Children’s ASL of linguistic materials reached the same level of maturity at age 6 as at age 8. While ASL of non-linguistic materials, VSL of both materials continually developed with age.
In summary, the current study found that there is a developmental advantage of the linguistic domain in ASL within 5~8 year old children. The results help us to understand the domain-general and domain-specific nature of SL further and provide new evidence that SL may be a multi-component ability.

Key words: children, statistical learning, stimulus type, modality, development