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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The importance of statistical learning

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, page 68 (2022)Cite this article

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Language learning depends on a combination of both experience-independent (implicit) and experience-dependent learning mechanisms. According to dominant theories of experience-independent language acquisition, infants have an innate set of biological mechanisms that enable them to acquire language regardless of their environment. This idea was consistent with evidence showing that complex language abilities develop rapidly even though language input is incomplete and sparsely represented. By contrast, according to theories of experience-dependent language acquisition, learned experiences with language are necessary to fine-tune innate language abilities and to acquire the specific properties of one’s native language. These learning-based mechanisms were believed to play a minor role in language learning because infants were thought to be poor learners.

However, in 1996, Saffran, Aslin and Newport showed that 8-month-old infants can successfully learn the intricacies of linguistic-like systems through limited exposure to a novel language corpus. Infants were exposed to two minutes of a continuous stream of three-syllable ‘words’ for which the only cue to word boundaries was the transitional probabilities between syllables. Following initial exposure, infants displayed a novelty preference, such that listening time was longer for stimuli that they had not been exposed to (nonwords and part words) compared with stimuli that they had previously encountered (words). This finding suggests that infants had extracted the serial order information and the sequential statistics of each syllable in the novel language. Thus, experience-dependent learning, now known as statistical learning, was shown to be a driving force in the acquisition of spoken language.

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References

Original article

  • Saffran, J. R. et al. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 5294 (1996)

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  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Rebecca Canale

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  1. Rebecca Canale
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Correspondence to Rebecca Canale.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Canale, R. The importance of statistical learning. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 68 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-021-00010-2

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