Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to implicitly extract regularities in the environment, and likely supports various higher-order behaviors, from language to music and vision. While specific patterns experience are likely to influence SL outcomes, this ability is tacitly conceptualized as a fixed construct, and few studies to date have investigated how experience may shape statistical learning. We report one experiment that directly tested whether SL can be modulated by previous experience. We used a prepost treatment design allowing us to pinpoint what specific aspects of “previous experience” matter for SL. The results show that performance on an artificial grammar learning task at post-test depends on whether the grammar to be learned at post-test matches the underlying grammar structures learned during treatment. Our study is the first to adopt a pre-post test design to directly modulate the effects of learning on learning itself.

Statistical learning (SL) is increasingly invoked as a set ofgeneral-purpose mechanisms upon which language learning isbuilt during infancy and childhood. Here we investigated theextent to which SL is related to adult language processing. Inparticular, we asked whether SL proclivities towards relationsthat are more informative of English are related to efficiency inreading English sentences by native speakers of Korean. Wefound that individuals with a stronger statistical learningsensitivity showed a larger effect of conditional wordprobability on word reading times, indicating that they moreefficiently incorporated statistical regularities of the languageduring reading. In contrast, L2 English proficiency was relatedto overall reading speed but not to the use of statisticalregularities.