Young School-Aged Children Are Sensitive to Simple and Complex Sequential Patterns in a Modified Serial Reaction Time Task

Abstract

The goal of this work is to determine how young children acquire domain-general sequential patterns that we hypothesize underlie language learning. Participants included 26 typically developing children, aged 5.0 to 8.9 (years.months; 12 female). Six participants (23%) identified as Hispanic (White: n = 4; Multiracial: n = 1; Unspecified: n = 1). Twenty participants identified as Not Hispanic (White: n = 16; Black/African American: n = 1; Multiracial; n = 3). A modified serial reaction time task assessed children's abilities to learn sequences that share key elements with either Word segmentation or grammatical structure. In the Word condition, sequences were based on local transitional probabilities. In the Grammar condition, sequences complied with a second-order rule. Each condition included a randomized comparison block. Children were sensitive to the sequences in both the Word and Grammar conditions during training, though this emerged more rapidly in the Word condition. Effect sizes (η_p²) ranged from moderate to large. Importantly, children did not generalize to novel exemplars in the Grammar condition. Thus, they may have attended to associative biphone sequences or visual features of the array rather than learning the second-order rule itself. This task affords the embedding of linguistically relevant sequences into a simple manual task to reveal domain-general learning mechanisms relevant for language.