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Measuring Statistical Learning Across Modalities and Domains in School-Aged Children Via an Online Platform and Neuroimaging Techniques
Published on: June 30, 2020
Twelve-month-old infants benefit from prior experience in statistical learning
1University of Wisconsin-Madison, Waisman Center, Madison, WI 53705, USA. lany@wisc.edu
Psychological Science
|January 6, 2009
Summary
Infants learn complex language patterns faster with prior experience. This study shows early exposure to simple word rules helps 12-month-olds grasp more difficult, nonadjacent language structures.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Infants detect environmental patterns, but how experience shapes this learning is unclear.
- While 12-month-olds learn adjacent word relationships, they struggle with nonadjacent ones until 15 months.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if 12-month-old infants can generalize prior experience with adjacent dependencies to nonadjacent ones.
- To determine the impact of experience on infants' sensitivity to statistical regularities in artificial language.
Main Methods:
- Infants were familiarized with an artificial language containing or lacking adjacent dependencies.
- Subsequently, infants were habituated to novel nonadjacent dependencies.
- Performance was assessed based on discrimination of these dependencies.
Main Results:
- Prior experience with adjacent dependencies significantly enhanced infants' learning of nonadjacent dependencies.
- Female infants demonstrated superior discrimination compared to male infants.
- This suggests sex-based differences in verbal memory capacity.
Conclusions:
- Prior experience can bootstrap infants' ability to learn complex language structures.
- Infants' learning mechanisms are profoundly influenced by their experiences.
- This research highlights the role of experience in early language acquisition.
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