After taking a semester-long hiatus, Candy and Deon are back! In this episode, they talk about classic work that examined how infants segment continous speech. Specifically, they discuss a classic paper published in Science by Jenny Saffran, Richard Aslin, and Elisa Newport (1996) (as well as follow-up papers) that examined infants' ability to segment speech by tracking the internal statistics of that speech. This episode is unique and unlike other episodes in that Candy and Deon pick on their own kind this time—empiricists! Hide your natvisists, hide your empiricists—no one's safe!
Links
Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R., & Newport, E. L. (1998). Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological science, 9(4), 321-324. Link to paper
Pelucchi, B., Hay, J. F., & Saffran, J. R. (2009). Statistical learning in a natural language by 8‐month‐old infants. Child development, 80(3), 674-685. Link to paper
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926-1928. Link to paper
Slone, L. K., & Johnson, S. P. (2018). When learning goes beyond statistics: Infants represent visual sequences in terms of chunks. Cognition, 178, 92-102. Link to paper