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Science 13 December 1996:
Vol. 274. no. 5294, pp. 1926 - 1928
DOI: 10.1126/science.274.5294.1926
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Reports

Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants

Jenny R. Saffran, Richard N. Aslin, Elissa L. Newport

Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.

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