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Words in a sea of sounds: the output of infant statistical learning
Abstract
One of the first problems confronting infant language learners is word segmentation: discovering the boundaries between words. Prior research suggests that 8-month-old infants can detect the statistical patterns that serve as a cue to word boundaries. However, the representational structure of the output of this learning process is unknown. This research assessed the extent to which statistical learning generates novel word-like units, rather than probabilistically-related strings of sounds. Eight-month-old infants were familiarized with a continuous stream of nonsense words with no acoustic cues to word boundaries. A post-familiarization test compared the infants' responses to words versus part-words (sequences spanning a word boundary) embedded either in simple English contexts familiar to the infants (e.g. "I like my tibudo"), or in matched nonsense frames (e.g. "zy fike ny tibudo"). Listening preferences were affected by the context (English versus nonsense) in which the items from the familiarization phase were embedded during testing. A second experiment confirmed that infants can discriminate the simple English contexts and the matched nonsense frames used in Experiment 1. The third experiment replicated the results of Experiment 1 by contrasting the English test frames with non-linguistic frames generated from tone sequences. The results support the hypothesis that statistical learning mechanisms generate word-like units with some status relative to the native languag…
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“Taken together, Saffran (2001) and Graf Estes et al.'s (2007) studies suggest that infants treat high probability items, and thus the output of statistical learning, as possible native language words rather than merely sound sequences with high internal probabilities but no linguistic relevance.”
From Statistically coherent labels facilitate categorization in 8-month-olds (2014) · cites this paper as Saffran (2001)
In the citing paper
“The difference in categorization performance as a function of label statistical structure indicates that the output of statistical learning shares properties of real words, consistent with theories that posit that statistical learning yields word-like representations (e.g., Saffran, 2001; Swingley, 2005).”
From Statistically coherent labels facilitate categorization in 8-month-olds (2014) · cites this paper as Saffran, 2001
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Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Saffran, J. R.
- Affiliations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- Corresponding author
- Saffran, Jenny R
- ORCID
- Saffran, Jenny R
- Venue
- Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2001-09
- Volume
- 81
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 149-169
- ISSN
- 0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2159265825
- Cited by
- 352
- References
- 50
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 72 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 11.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cognition (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD 03352, HD37466, P30HD003352)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Keywords
- word segmentation, word boundaries, context effects, listening preferences, tone sequences, language acquisition, infant language acquisition
- MeSH terms
- Auditory Perception, Child Development, Female, Humans, Infant, Language Development, Male, Noise, Semantics
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