Abstract Earlier work indicates that bilingualism may positively affect statistical learning, but leaves open whether a bilingual benefit is (1) found during learning rather than in a post-hoc test following a learning phase and (2) explained by enhanced verbal short-term memory skill in the bilinguals. Forty-one bilingual and 56 monolingual preschoolers completed a serial reaction time task and a nonword repetition task (NWR). Linear mixed-effect regressions indicated that the bilinguals showed a stronger decrease in reaction times over the regular blocks of the task than the monolinguals. No group differences in accuracy-based measures were found. NWR performance, which did not differ between the groups, did not account for the attested effect of bilingualism. These results provide partial support for effects of bilingualism on statistical learning, which appear during learning and are not due to enhanced verbal short-term memory. Taken together, these findings add to a growing body of research on effects of bilingualism on statistical learning, and constitute a first step towards investigating the factors which may underlie such effects.

中文翻译：

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双语对学龄前儿童统计学习的影响

摘要 早期的工作表明双语可能对统计学习产生积极影响，但双语的好处是否（1）在学习期间而不是在学习阶段后的事后测试中发现和（2）通过增强的口头短期记忆解释双语能力。41 名双语和 56 名单语学龄前儿童完成了连续反应时间任务和非单词重复任务 (NWR)。线性混合效应回归表明，与单语者相比，双语者在常规任务块上的反应时间下降幅度更大。未发现基于准确性的测量存在组间差异。NWR 的表现在各组之间没有差异，并未考虑双语的证明效果。这些结果为双语对统计学习的影响提供了部分支持，这些影响出现在学习过程中，并不是由于口头短期记忆的增强。总之，这些发现增加了越来越多关于双语对统计学习的影响的研究，并构成了调查可能造成这种影响的因素的第一步。