title: Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
authors.forename: J R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Saffran
authors.forename: R N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Aslin
authors.forename: E L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Newport
mesh_terms: D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D013067:Speech Perception