Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It has been suggested that the detection of statistical regularities in language a skill fundamental to language acquisitionis supported by brain areas that are also involved in implicit motor skill learning. The present study is one of the firstto explore this claim in an artificial language learning experiment. We used continuous theta-burst transcranial magneticstimulation (cTBS) to temporarily inhibit functioning of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) or the primarymotor cortex (M1) in healthy adults. We hypothesized that the left DLPFC plays a role in adults detection of nonadjacentdependencies (NADs) and therefore that learning should be disrupted in the group of adults receiving cTBS to this area.Our results provide no evidence for (or against) this claim, however. An interesting exploratory result is that learning ofNADs may be enhanced in adults who received cTBS to the M1 as compared to participants who received sham cTBS.