Statistical Learning and Working Memory, domain-general vs. the domain-specific processes.
Summary
The debate on the understanding of language learning and acquisition as domain-general or domain-specific mechanism has been a hot and controversial issue since Chomsky postulation of his generative (transformational) grammatical theory. A similar controversy in the field of Statistical Learning (SL) is also on the bases of how learning of structured sequences occurs. While a long set of published results comparing the acquisition of structured data across domains seems to support the domain-specific account, other experiments in which Working Memory and SL are combined (Palmer and Mattys, 2016) seems to fit with the domain-general view. The idea of this seminar is just to present this controversy together with a new account from Frost et al. (2014 TiCS) in which these two apparently contradictory accounts are called into reconciliation.
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