Jenny Saffran, Ph.D.
L&S Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor
Infant Learning Lab
Little Listeners Lab
Department of Psychology
Waisman Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Learning to Understand: Statistical Learning and Infant Language Development
Infants rapidly develop from being naïve listeners, who experience language as a sea of sounds, to understanding their native language(s). How does this remarkable learning process unfold? One potentially useful source of information lies in the statistical patterns that characterize natural languages, which signal structures ranging from phonemes to words to grammatical structures. Over the past two decades, researchers have demonstrated that infants are sensitive to myriad statistical regularities in language input. Beyond merely tracking these patterns, how might infants use statistical regularities to support language development? In my presentation, I will explore the hypothesis that infants exploit statistical regularities in the service of efficiently processing information in their linguistic environments, generating predictions and detecting areas of uncertainty that merit additional learning. By learning to efficiently encode language input, infants become increasingly able to process their native language(s).
Grant funding: NICHD R01 HD105313, NICHD R37 HD37466, NIDCD R01 DC012513