Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A wealth of statistical learning research has provided evidence that regularities in which items co-occur (referred to hereas syntagmatic) can be learned implicitly. However, it is not known whether higher-order relations can also be learnedimplicitly. Here we present two experiments that investigate whether regularities, where items do not co-occur but insteadshare co-occurrence with each other (referred to here as paradigmatic), can be learned implicitly. In Experiment 1, weused a traditional auditory statistical learning paradigm where participants passively listened to an auditory stream con-taining syntagmatic and paradigmatic regularities and found evidence only of syntagmatic learning. In Experiment 2, weinstructed participants to attend to items during the training session and found evidence of learning paradigmatic relationsin participants who demonstrated high-level of syntagmatic learning. The results are discussed in terms of the limits ofimplicit learning and the role of attentional mechanisms in learning higher-order statistical regularities.