Infant Statistical Learning

Saffran, Jenny R.; Kirkham, Natasha Z.

doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011805

Cited by 285 publications

(198 citation statements)

References 132 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

189

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Frequency effects on learning are well recognized in psycholinguistics (Bod, Hay, & Jannedy, ; Bybee & Hopper, ), and there is much research evidencing connectionist (Christiansen & Chater, ), statistical (Saffran & Kirkham, ), and exemplar‐based (Pierrehumbert, ) language learning.…”

Section: Learning and Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition

Ellis

2019

The Modern Language Journal

140

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cognition is not just ‘in the head’; it extends well beyond the skull and the skin. Non‐Cartesian Cognitive Science views cognition as being embodied, environmentally embedded, enacted, encultured, and socially distributed. The Douglas Fir Group (2016) likewise recognizes languages as emergent, social, integrated phenomena. Language is the quintessence of distributed cognition. Language cognition is shared across naturally occurring, culturally constituted, communicative activities. Usage affects learning and it affects languages, too. These are essential components of a theory of language cognition. This article summarizes these developments within cognitive science before considering implications for language research and teaching, especially as these concern usage‐based language learning and cognition in second language and multilingual contexts. Here, I prioritize research involving corpus‐, computational‐, and psycho‐linguistics, and cognitive psychological, complex adaptive system, and network science investigations of learner–language interactions. But there are many other implications. Looking at languages through any one single lens does not do the phenomena justice. Taking the social turn does not entail restricting our research focus to the social. Nor does it obviate more traditional approaches to second language acquisition. Instead it calls for greater transdisciplinarity, diversity, and collaborative work.

show abstract

Section: Learning and Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition

Ellis

2019

The Modern Language Journal

140

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research on adult event segmentation mechanisms provides hints about how these mechanisms may develop in children. Infants could use statistical learning of action regularities to bootstrap event segmentation, similar to adults (Buchsbaum et al, ) and similar to infants’ use of statistical learning to bootstrap speech segmentation (see Saffran & Kirkham, , for a review). Moreover, given the redundancy between movement features and goal structures in events (Zacks et al, )—particularly for everyday events—one possibility is that infants may initially be sensitive to low‐level event structure (i.e., action regularities, movement features), and may gradually learn about the goal structure of events through the overlap of these structures (Baldwin et al, ).…”

Section: Adults: Leveraging Event Predictions For Segmentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding events in a continuous world: A developmental account

Levine

Buchsbaum

Hirsh‐Pasek

et al. 2018

Developmental Psychobiology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Event segmentation is a fundamental process of human cognition that organizes the continuous flux of activity into discrete, hierarchical units. The mechanism of event segmentation in infants seems to parallel the mechanism studied in adults, which centers on action predictability. Statistical learning appears to bootstrap infants’ event segmentation by generating action predictions without relying on prior knowledge. Infants’ first‐hand experiences with goal‐directed actions further enhance their prediction of others’ actions. Scaffolds for event segmentation are available in the input, with caregivers providing redundant cues to event boundaries through the use of motionese and acoustic packaging. Research points to the importance of developing event segmentation skills for development in other areas of cognition, including memory, social competence, and language, though more work is needed to capture the directionality of effects. Although event segmentation is a relatively new area of focus in cognition, this process illuminates how children make sense of an ever‐changing world.

show abstract

“…How they achieve this is currently unclear. While all modern theories of cognitive development agree that infants possess powerful general mechanisms for learning about the world (Csibra & Gergely, ; Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, ; Endress & Bonatti, ; Frost, Armstrong, Siegelman, & Christiansen, ; Gopnik, ; Marcus, ; Romberg & Saffran, ; Saffran & Kirkham, ; Smith, Suanda, & Yu, ), the ways in which these mechanisms are narrowed and specialized, to focus on extracting the most vital information from different specific domains, is much more controversial.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The profile of abstract rule learning in infancy: Meta‐analytic and experimental evidence

Rabagliati

Ferguson

Lew‐Williams

2018

Developmental Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Everyone agrees that infants possess general mechanisms for learning about the world, but the existence and operation of more specialized mechanisms is controversial. One mechanism-rule learning-has been proposed as potentially specific to speech, based on findings that 7-month-olds can learn abstract repetition rules from spoken syllables (e.g. ABB patterns: wo-fe-fe, ga-tu-tu…) but not from closely matched stimuli, such as tones. Subsequent work has shown that learning of abstract patterns is not simply specific to speech. However, we still lack a parsimonious explanation to tie together the diverse, messy, and occasionally contradictory findings in that literature. We took two routes to creating a new profile of rule learning: meta-analysis of 20 prior reports on infants' learning of abstract repetition rules (including 1,318 infants in 63 experiments total), and an experiment on learning of such rules from a natural, non-speech communicative signal. These complementary approaches revealed that infants were most likely to learn abstract patterns from meaningful stimuli. We argue that the ability to detect and generalize simple patterns supports learning across domains in infancy but chiefly when the signal is meaningfully relevant to infants' experience with sounds, objects, language, and people.

show abstract

Infant Statistical Learning

Cited by 285 publications

References 132 publications

Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition

Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition

Finding events in a continuous world: A developmental account

The profile of abstract rule learning in infancy: Meta‐analytic and experimental evidence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About