General rule learning in school children

Abstract

The study investigated Chinese school age children’s rule learning ability of non-adjacent dependency pattern with musical tones. Thirty-nine students with a mean age of 10 years and 5 months old were randomly assigned into 1 of 2 rule groups (SD= 10 months). They listened to musical tone streams generated according to non-adjacent dependency rule patterns. Afterwards, they judged if testing stimuli resembled the rules in training phase. Results showed that the participants were not able to extract non-adjacent rules from musical tones. Instead, the participants performed the task by learning adjacent dependency rule as the default. However, we cannot conclude there is no non-adjacent rule learning in Chinese population because the design of the study may be too difficult for school-aged children. For example, the variability of intervening elements was not sufficient and the differences on musical tones were very subtle for identification. Further research can consider the use of perceptual cues or melodies to investigate rule learning ability of non-adjacent dependency of nonspeech domain in Chinese population.