Statistical learning ability influences adults’ reading of complex sentences.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether a relationship exists between statistical learning ability and sentence processing ability in adult readers and whether this relationship depends on the participant's exposure to print. Fifty participants read syntactically complex sentences while their eye movements were tracked and answered comprehension questions. The region of interest for the eye fixation analyses was the area where the complexity of the sentence became evident. Participants also completed a visual statistical learning (VSL) task and an author recognition test (ART). There were main effects of statistical learning ability and print exposure, as well as an interaction between the two on both first pass and total reading times. Reading times decreased with increasing VSL scores for participants with higher ART scores, whereas reading times increased with increasing VSL scores for participants with lower ART scores. In addition, participants with better statistical learning ability and greater print exposure had higher scores on the comprehension questions. These results demonstrate that efficient processing of complex syntactic structures depends on both good statistical learning skills and exposure to a large amount of print so that these skills have the opportunity to extract the relevant statistical relationships in the language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".