TY - JOUR
T1 - All words are not created equal
T2 - Expectations about word length guide infant statistical learning
AU - Lew-Williams, Casey
AU - Saffran, Jenny R.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to C.L.W. (F32HD069094), J.R.S. (R01HD037466), and the Waisman Center (P30HD03352). Additional support was provided by a grant from the James F. McDonnell Foundation to J.R.S. Thanks to the participating families and the members of the Infant Learning Lab. We are also grateful to Jon Willits and Erik Thiessen for feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.
PY - 2012/2
Y1 - 2012/2
N2 - Infants have been described as 'statistical learners' capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed of a different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants' abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input.
AB - Infants have been described as 'statistical learners' capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed of a different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants' abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input.
KW - Infant language learning
KW - Prior experience
KW - Statistical learning
KW - Transfer
KW - Word segmentation
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.007
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.007
M3 - Article
C2 - 22088408
AN - SCOPUS:84155165106
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 122
SP - 241
EP - 246
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 2
ER -