We have previously shown that readers use co-occurrence statistics to learn about the presence and position of affix-like chunks in strings of pseudo-letters (Lelonkiewicz, Ktori & Crepaldi, 2020). These findings were taken as evidence that visual statistical learning might be implicated in morphological processing during visual word recognition. The present study seeks to specify this claim by (a) establishing the visual, language-agnostic nature of the underlying learning mechanism and (b) examining it in the presence of higher-order linguistic information. In Experiments 1a and 1b, readers were familiarized with strings of abstract shapes that involved affix-like chunks of frequently co-occurring shapes. We found that readers were sensitive to the presence and position of chunks. Further experiments revealed that presence and position effects were stronger when readers were exposed to letter strings which allowed access to orthographic and phonological representations (Experiments 2a and 2b), and were enhanced by access to semantics (Experiment 3). Our study demonstrates that the learning of visual regularities supports chunk identification both in purely visual and language-like materials, and that the availability of linguistic information enhances this learning.

我们之前已经表明，读者使用共现统计来了解类词缀块在伪字母字符串中的存在和位置（Lelonkiewicz, Ktori & Crepaldi, 2020). 这些发现被视为视觉统计学习可能与视觉单词识别过程中的形态处理有关的证据。本研究试图通过 (a) 建立底层学习机制的视觉、语言不可知的性质和 (b) 在存在高阶语言信息的情况下对其进行检查来具体说明这一主张。在实验 1a 和 1b 中，读者熟悉抽象形状串，这些抽象形状串涉及频繁同时出现的形状的词缀状块。我们发现读者对块的存在和位置很敏感。进一步的实验表明，当读者接触到允许访问正字法和语音表示的字母串时，存在和位置效应会更强（实验 2a 和 2b），并通过访问语义得到增强（实验 3）。我们的研究表明，视觉规律性的学习支持纯视觉材料和类语言材料中的块识别，并且语言信息的可用性增强了这种学习。