The Contributions of Statistical Learning to L2 Morphosyntax Processing Across Visual and Auditory Modalities in Chinese Adolescent Learners

Individual differences in statistical learning (SL) constitute an important cognitive mechanism that supports second language (L2) syntactic processing. However, existing research has primarily focused on adult populations, while potential differences across input modalities remain understudied. This study investigated the associations between SL and implicit L2 morphosyntactic processing among Chinese adolescent English learners, comparing results across visual and auditory modalities. Participants completed visual and auditory SL tasks, self-paced reading (SPR), self-paced listening (SPL), as well as working memory (WM) and attention tasks. L2 morphosyntactic processing ability was measured via grammatical sensitivity indicators extracted from SPR and SPL data. Mixed-effects analyses did not detect statistically reliable group-level grammaticality effects in either task, though SPR exhibited a descriptive pattern where ungrammatical sentences elicited longer reading times at the third word. Participants achieved higher accuracy on the visual SL task than the auditory one. In exploratory regression analyses, visual SL accuracy was found to positively predict grammatical sensitivity measured at Word 3 in SPR. Still, this association was not confirmed in a follow-up sensitivity analysis. No corresponding significant association was observed between auditory SL and SPL sensitivity, and neither working memory nor attention showed consistent independent contributions to the outcome. These findings extend individual-differences research on this topic to adolescent classroom L2 learners and underscore the potentially important role of visual regularity learning in online L2 reading processing.