Infant and adult learners are able to identify word boundaries in fluent speech using statistical information. Similarly, learners are able to use statistical information to identify word–object associations. Successful language learning requires both feats. In this series of experiments, we presented adults and infants with audio–visual input from which it was possible to identify both word boundaries and word–object relations. Adult learners were able to identify both kinds of statistical relations from the same input. Moreover, their learning was actually facilitated (...) by the presence of two simultaneously present relations. Eight-month-old infants, however, do not appear to benefit from the presence of regular relations between words and objects. Adults, like 8-month-olds, did not benefit from regular audio–visual correspondences when they were tested with tones, rather than linguistic input. These differences in learning outcomes across age and input suggest that both developmental and stimulus-based constraints affect statistical learning. (shrink)

Statistical learning refers to the ability to identify structure in the input based on its statistical properties. For many linguistic structures, the relevant statistical features are distributional: They are related to the frequency and variability of exemplars in the input. These distributional regularities have been suggested to play a role in many different aspects of language learning, including phonetic categories, using phonemic distinctions in word learning, and discovering non-adjacent relations. On the surface, these different aspects share few commonalities. Despite this, (...) we demonstrate that the same computational framework can account for learning in all of these tasks. These results support two conclusions. The first is that much, and perhaps all, of distributional statistical learning can be explained by the same underlying set of processes. The second is that some aspects of language can be learned due to domain-general characteristics of memory. (shrink)