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Summary: © 2009 The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 486
Statistical learning studies have demonstrated that adults,
young children, and infants are capable of rapidly learning
consistent relationships among temporally adjacent speech
sounds or musical tones and of grouping these elements
into larger coherent units, such as words or melodies (Aslin,
Saffran, & Newport, 1998; Perruchet & Pacton, 2006; Saf-
fran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996; Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, &
Newport, 1999; Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996; Saffran,
Newport, Aslin, Tunick, & Barrueco, 1997). Similarly,
adults and infants are capable of grouping temporally adja-
cent patterned visual elements into coherent units (Fiser &
Aslin, 2002; Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002).
In contrast, however, the ability to learn dependencies
among nonadjacent elements is more selective. Natural
languages exhibit only certain limited nonadjacent depen-
dencies among sounds and word classes (Chomsky, 1957).
In artificial language experiments, only certain types of
nonadjacent patterns are readily learned (Cleeremans &
McClelland, 1991; Gómez, 2002; Newport &Aslin, 2004;
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