Browsing by Author "Pomare, Adriano"

Statistical learning (SL) is a set of cognitive mechanisms which allow an organism to subconsciously pick up recurring patterns from its environment. While research in this field has flourished over the past decades, its relationship with multilingualism remains unclear. Our goal is to estimate the extent of this relationship by comparing individual language skills with the performance in a statistical language learning (SLL) task. For this purpose, we conducted an online experiment to collect information about the participants' linguistic background and to test their SL ability via a Statistically Induced Chunking Recall (SICR) task. Additionally, visual linguistic stimuli were generated to examine how the phonotactic rules of the participants' native tongue would impact SL. In particular, we tested how violating vowel harmony in Finnish affected the performance of participants with different degrees of multilingualism. To measure multilingualism, we created the Multilingualism Score (MS), a multifactorial index designed to gauge one's multilingualism level and to analyse its relationship with the performance in the SICR task. Our results exhibit positive correlation between these two factors, suggesting that multilingualism and SLL are significantly correlated. We also observed overall lower performance associated with the violation of vowel harmony. However, we were not able to establish a clear connection between multilingualism and the performance gap.