Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.