Statistical learning in children and adults: Evidence from behavioural and neural entrainment data

The following data was used to assess statistical learning (SL) to six minutes of an artificial language in 8- to 12-year-old children and adults. We used explicit and implicit behavioural measures and an EEG measure of neural entrainment. EEG data were recorded while participants listened to the six-minute artificial language. Behavioural data was gathered immediately after exposure to the language. A two-alternative forced choice task and a rating task were used to assess explicit learning. A target detection task was used to assess implicit syllable prediction. Children (n = 56) completed all three behavioural tasks, whereas adults (n = 40) completed the rating task and target detection task. EEG data was gathered for 55 children and 24 adult participants. With few exceptions, children and adults showed largely similar performance on the behavioural explicit and implicit tasks, replicating prior work. Children and adults also demonstrated robust neural entrainment to both words and syllables, with a similar time course of word-level entrainment, reflecting learning of the hidden word structure.

The data included here is the raw data, before preprocessing.