Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants.
Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.
Saffran
J R
JR
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
Aslin
R N
RN
Newport
E L
EL
D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D013067:Speech Perception