Cross-situational learning of foreign words in younger and older adults

Whereas statistical learning, the tracking of regularities in the environment, has been found to be critical in language acquisition, limited research has investigated how this process works for the older population. In the present study, we addressed this gap by comparing older and younger adults’ performance in a cross-situational word learning paradigm, where participants learned novel word-referent mappings via statistical tracking of co-occurrences across multiple trials. Moreover, we tested whether this learning process was affected by previous experience with multiple languages (i.e., the bilingualism effect). We found that both age groups successfully learned non-native words after a short exposure, confirming that statistical learning ability is preserved in late adulthood. The two groups, however, differed in their learning trajectories and the younger group outperformed the older group during the later stages of learning. Previous language experience did not predict learning outcomes. Our findings have implications for language education in the older population, suggesting that implicit exposure is powerful for older adults learning a foreign language.