Infants with Williams syndrome detect statistical regularities in continuous speech.
Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder associated with delays in language and cognitive development. The reasons for the language delay are unknown. Statistical learning is a domain-general mechanism recruited for early language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated whether infants with WS were able to detect the statistical structure in continuous speech. Eighteen 8- to 20-month-olds with WS were familiarized with 2min of a continuous stream of synthesized nonsense words; the statistical structure of the speech was the only cue to word boundaries. They were tested on their ability to discriminate statistically-defined "words" and "part-words" (which crossed word boundaries) in the artificial language. Despite significant cognitive and language delays, infants with WS were able to detect the statistical regularities in the speech stream. These findings suggest that an inability to track the statistical properties of speech is unlikely to be the primary basis for the delays in the onset of language observed in infants with WS. These results provide the first evidence of statistical learning by infants with developmental delays.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, USA. Electronic address: cara.cashon@louisville.edu.
Cara H
CH
Cashon
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, USA.
Oh-Ryeong
OR
Ha
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, USA.
Katharine
K
Graf Estes
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Jenny R
JR
Saffran
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, USA.
Carolyn B
CB
Mervis
D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011337:Probability Learning; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary; D018980:Williams Syndrome
Infancy; Language delay; Language development; Lexical development; Statistical learning; Williams syndrome