Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants
Abstract
A recent report demonstrated that 8-month-olds can segment a continuous stream of speech syllables, containing no acoustic or prosodic cues to word boundaries, into wordlike units after only 2 min of listening experience (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). Thus, a powerful learning mechanism capable of extracting statistical information from fluent speech is available early in development. The present study extends these results by documenting the particular type of statistical computation—transitional (conditional) probability—used by infants to solve this word-segmentation task. An artificial language corpus, consisting of a continuous stream of trisyllabic nonsense words, was presented to 8-month-olds for 3 min. A postfamiliarization test compared the infants' responses to words versus part-words (trisyllabic sequences spanning word boundaries). The corpus was constructed so that test words and part-words were matched in frequency, but differed in their transitional probabilities. Infants showed reliable discrimination of words from part-words, thereby demonstrating rapid segmentation of continuous speech into words on the basis of transitional probabilities of syllable pairs.
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This learning process was based on the computation of the conditional probabilities of successive syllables, rather than a simpler computation of the frequencies of syllable co-occurrences.
“An additional experiment confirmed that this learning process was based on the computation of the conditional probabilities of successive syllables, rather than a simpler computation of the frequencies of syllable co-occurrences (Aslin et al., 1998).”
From Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults (1999) · cites this paper as Aslin et al., 1998
The basis for infants' ability to discriminate words from part-words in tone sequences is likely to reside in the same sorts of probability computations between speech sounds discussed by Saffran and colleagues.
“The basis for infants' ability to discriminate words from part-words in tone sequences, therefore, is likely to reside in the same sorts of probability computations between speech sounds discussed by Saffran and colleagues (Saffran et al., 1996a(Saffran et al., ,b, 1997)), and directly tested by Aslin et al. (1998).”
From Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults (1999) · cites this paper as Aslin et al. (1998)
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- Authors
- Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R., & Newport, E. L.
- Affiliations
- Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
- University of Rochester (US)
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1998-07
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 321-324
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W2115197214
- Cited by
- 1,189
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 37 · 2022: 76 · 2021: 47 · 2020: 78 · 2019: 133 · 2018: 35 · 2017: 43 · 2016: 46 · 2015: 42 · 2014: 42 · 2013: 54 · 2012: 41
- FWCI
- 27.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- 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
- transition probabilities, conditional probability, statistical learning, speech perception, artificial languages, nonsense words, infant language acquisition
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