Statistical learning in childhood: Dimensions, developmental trajectory, and relation with cognitive control

Compared to other developmental processes, such as cognitive control, there is relatively little consensus on the developmental trajectory of statistical learning (the ability to implicitly extract environmental regularities). The literature is further complicated as statistical learning may comprise distinct subtypes, differing in the regularities being tracked. Three statistical learning abilities and cognitive control were assessed in one hundred eighty-seven 5-12-year-olds (42.8% female, 84.6% White) at a university laboratory between March 2023 and August 2024. The ability to extract cue-based and nonadjacent statistics was age invariant, whereas adjacent dependency extraction yielded a greater benefit in younger than in older children. Despite research suggesting immature top-down guidance facilitates statistical learning, there was only weak evidence of an association with cognitive control, and the direction of these associations varied between "online" and "offline" measures of children's sensitivity to adjacent dependencies. Importantly, the different subtypes were uncorrelated, supporting the notion that statistical learning is multifaceted.