Statistical learning allows us to discover myriad structures in our environment, which is saturated with information at many different levels--from items to categories. How do children learn different levels of information--about regularities that pertain to items and the categories they come from--and how does this differ from adults? Studies on…

Purpose: Statistical learning--the ability to learn patterns in environmental input--is increasingly recognized as a foundational mechanism necessary for the successful acquisition of spoken language. Spoken language is a complex, serially presented signal that contains embedded statistical relations among linguistic units, such as phonemes,…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit difficulties with social communication skills that negatively impacts quality of life. Training parents to implement effective interventions that improve the social communication skills of children with ASD may facilitate parent-child interaction and ameliorate the impact of social…

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and…

Graph complexity as measured by topological entropy has been previously shown to affect performance on artificial grammar learning tasks among typically developing children. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of graph complexity on implicit sequential learning among children with developmental dyslexia. Our goal was to determine…

This study aimed at investigating the ability to learn regularities across the life span and examine whether this learning process can be supported or hampered by verbalizations. For this purpose, children (aged 8-10 years) and younger (aged 19-30 years) and older (aged 70-80 years) adults took part in a sequence learning experiment. We found that…

In the digital era, some people must use technology to support their works or even their pleasure time. A game is one of the digital applications for some people to spend their leisure time, including children. However, indirectly, a game also can be an educational tool for children, especially for language. Based on the description, the…

Accumulating evidence suggests that literacy acquisition involves developing sensitivity to the statistical regularities of the textual environment. To organize accumulating evidence and help guide future inquiry, this article integrates data from disparate fields of study and formalizes a new two-process framework for developing sensitivity to…

While no exact information on the prevalence exists, it is assumed that the overall incidence of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen every year in Japan. However, given the lack of resources and services for families of children with ASD in Japan, there is a dearth of practical guidance for the support for those families. This…

Casual games are everywhere. People play them throughout life to pass the time, to engage in social interactions, and to learn. However, their simplicity and use in distraction-heavy environments can attenuate their potential for learning. This experimental study explored the effects playing an online, casual game has on awareness of human…