Concurrent visual learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies in adults and children

Concurrent learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies has been shown in adults only. This study extended this line of research by examining dependency-specific learning for both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies concurrently in both adults and children. Seventy adults aged 18 to 64 (40 females, 30 males; Experiment 1) and 64 children aged 10 to 11 years (40 girls, 24 boys; Experiment 2) were tested with a new serial reaction time (SRT) task in which they were trained for 6 - 8 minutes on materials comprising equally probable adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. They were then asked to discriminate between trained and untrained dependencies in a familiarity task. Both adults and children showed implicit concurrent learning of both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. The two dependency types were learnt to the same extent. However, adults showed a rapid, sustainable and dependency-specific sensitivity throughout the SRT task while children only showed a dependency-specific sensitivity to violations of expectations after exposure. When the two groups were statistically compared, only adults showed a dependency-specific learning effect after exposure. These findings are in line with the age-related improvement model of dependency learning.