Twelve-Month-Old Infants Benefit From Prior Experience in Statistical Learning

Abstract

A decade of research suggests that infants readily detect patterns in their environment, but it is unclear how such learning changes with experience. We tested how prior experience influences sensitivity to statistical regularities in an artificial language. Although 12-month-old infants learn adjacent relationships between word categories, they do not track nonadjacent relationships until 15 months. We asked whether 12-month-old infants could generalize experience with adjacent dependencies to nonadjacent ones. Infants were familiarized to an artificial language either containing or lacking adjacent dependencies between word categories and were subsequently habituated to novel nonadjacent dependencies. Prior experience with adjacent dependencies resulted in enhanced learning of the nonadjacent dependencies. Female infants showed better discrimination than males did, which is consistent with earlier reported sex differences in verbal memory capacity. The findings suggest that prior experience can bootstrap infants' learning of difficult language structure and that learning mechanisms are powerfully affected by experience.Statistical information, such as the frequency of different events and the likelihood of their co-occurrence with other events, provides us with critical knowledge about our environment. For example, facial features are likely to co-occur (e.g., mouths co-occur with two eyes and a nose). Likewise, the occurrence of the word a or the suggests that a noun like cat or duck is likely to follow. Sensitivity to statistical information emerges early in development, with infants detecting regularities in visual input by 2 months of age (Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002) and in aurally presented stimuli by 7 months (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996;. Research over the last decade suggests that statistical learning plays a critical role in language acquisition by supporting segmentation of words from fluent speech (Saffran et al., 1996), acquisition of word-order patterns (Gómez & Gerken, 1999), and syntactic categories and their co-occurrence privileges (Gerken, Wilson, & Lewis, 2005;Gómez & LaKusta, 2004).One important question researchers would like to answer is how statistical learning is affected by experience, and they have begun to address this question in the domains of word segmentation and vocabulary development. For example, experience with phonological properties helps infants segment words from fluent speech Thiessen & Saffran, 2007), and successful word segmentation in turn facilitates learning cooccurrence relationships between words (Saffran & Wilson, 2003). Likewise, experience with associations between individual objects and labels can attune infants to higher order correspondences between words and their referents (e.g., object labels tend to refer to things In our study, we asked how prior experience influences the acquisition of complex syntactic patterns. For example, sensitivity to nonadjacent relationships between words is necessary for learning the hierarchical structure o...

Auditory perception at the root of language learning

“…In the light of these findings, it is not surprising that the polarities of the pitch MMR and the rule MMR differ across sexes. The observed differences between boys and girls could be mediated by the hormone testosterone, which has been found to negatively impact phonological discrimination abilities in 1-mo-olds (32) and are in line with evidence showing that girls outperform boys in remote dependency learning at later developmental stages (i.e., at 12 mo) (18) and in general verbal abilities during childhood (26,34).…”

“…Previous studies testing infants' learning of nonadjacent dependency rules behaviorally did not observe any learning before 12 mo of age (17,18). However, a recent ERP study indicated that infants might be sensitive to nonadjacent dependency rules in a novel language already at the age of 4 mo (10).…”

“…Because previous findings suggest sex differences specifically for verbal learning tasks (18,26), we tested a comparable number of males and females in all participant groups, allowing us to look at sex-specific learning effects. The infant group (Exp.…”

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Components of the Language-Ready Brain

“…Early on, infants need more concurrent exogenous cues such as high degree of similarity, same identity between the dependent pairs (Creel et al, 2004;Onnis et al, 2005) or prior exposure to them (Lany and Gómez, 2008;Lai and Poletiek, 2011) (for a review, see Perruchet et al, 2012), to help them to orient their attention to the relevant information (Pacton and Perruchet, 2008;Pacton et al, 2015), allowing a greater interaction between exogenous and endogenous attention. At later stages of development, after the first year of age, the improved endogenous system allows infants to rely less on the availability of these salient features to orient their attention to the relevant information.…”