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Updated: Dec 25, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
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Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development.

Rebecca L A Frost1, Andrew Jessop1, Samantha Durrant2

  • 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands.

Cognitive Psychology
|March 21, 2020
PubMed
Summary

Infants use statistical learning to segment words from speech, which correlates with their vocabulary size. This ability may also help them learn language structure, though this connection requires further research.

Keywords:
Artificial grammar learningIndividual differencesLanguage acquisitionSpeech segmentationStatistical learningVocabulary development

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Infants must identify words and linguistic structure for language acquisition.
  • Statistical learning is proposed to aid these processes.
  • The interplay between statistical learning for word segmentation and structure discovery in infants is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 17-month-old infants can use statistical learning to segment words and identify structure in an artificial language.
  • To examine the relationship between infants' statistical learning abilities and their vocabulary development.

Main Methods:

  • 17-month-old infants were trained on an artificial language with non-adjacent dependencies.
  • An eye-tracked head-turn-preference paradigm assessed sensitivity to words and structure.
  • Vocabulary size was measured using the Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) at multiple time points.

Main Results:

  • Infants successfully segmented words from speech, showing greater looking times for words versus part-words.
  • Segmentation performance significantly correlated with current and future receptive and expressive vocabulary size.
  • Sensitivity to generalized structure was suggested but not linked to vocabulary size.

Conclusions:

  • Infants' statistical learning facilitates word segmentation, which is linked to vocabulary growth.
  • Similar statistical mechanisms may underlie both word and structure discovery in speech.
  • The direct link between statistical learning for structure and vocabulary size needs further investigation.