Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The past 15-20 years have witnessed a particularly strong interest in our ability to rapidly extract structured information from the environment. This fundamental process of human cognition is widely believed to underpin many complex behaviors – from language development and social interaction to intuitive decision making and music cognition – so this interest spans practically all branches of cognitive science. Research on this topic can be found in two related, yet traditionally distinct research strands, namely "implicit learning" (Reber, 1967) and "statistical learning" (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). Both lines of research focus on how we acquire information from complex stimulus domains and both rely heavily on the use of artificial systems (e.g., finite-state grammars, pseudoword lexicons). In typical experiments, participants are initially exposed to stimuli generated by an artificial system and then tested to determine what they have learned. Given these and other significant similarities, Perruchet and Pacton (2006) argue that these distinct lines of research actually represent two approaches to a single phenomenon, and Conway and Christiansen (2006) propose combining the two in name: "implicit-statistical learning". Yet, despite frequent acknowledgements that researchers in implicit learning and statistical learning might essentially be looking at the same phenomenon, there is surprisingly little alignment between the two strands. This symposium seeks to remedy this situation by bringing together leading researchers from both areas in order to promote a shared understanding of research questions and methodologies, to discuss similarities and differences between the two approaches, and to work towards a joint research agenda. The symposium comprises four presentations, followed by a thematic discussion, which provide coverage of these phenomena in terms of development (children and adults), different language learning tasks (sublexical phonotactics, word acquisition, grammar learning), and their role in both production and comprehension, each integrating multidisciplinary perspectives. Gomez focuses on implicit-statistical learning in early development, identifying words and grammatical sequences and the memory systems that underlie this learning. Monaghan and Rebuschat measure word learning and grammar learning in adults, while varying the knowledge that participants have of the structure they are acquiring. Dell and Anderson demonstrate how their work on acquisition of phonotactic constraints is exhibited in speakers’ productions, and discuss the inter-relation in speech between implicit and statistical learning. Finally, Conway provides an overview of the two fields, and proposes a novel framework that unifies implicit learning and statistical learning.