Talk on statistical learning

While statistical learning is considered among the most important contributors of language and literacy acquisition, it is still debated 1) whether and how the acquisition of distributional characteristics depends on the source modalities, and 2) how statistical information of written language characteristics may be utilized across reading development. After a brief conceptual and methodological overview, I will provide converging evidence using various statistical learning methodologies in favour of a modality- and domain-independent learning mechanism. Then I will propose two possible links between statistical learning and reading development - in both typical readers and children with dyslexia - and demonstrate how crucial learning distributional information is.