From Syllables to Syntax: Multilevel Statistical Learning by 12-Month-Old Infants

To successfully acquire language, infants must be able to track multiple levels of regularities in the input. In many cases, regularities only emerge after some learning has already occurred. For example, the grammatical relationships between words are only evident once the words have been segmented from continuous speech. To ask whether infants can engage in this type of learning process, 12-month-old infants in 2 experiments were familiarized with multiword utterances synthesized as continuous speech. The words in the utterances were ordered based on a simple finite-state grammar. Following exposure, infants were tested on novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The results indicate that the infants were able to perform 2 statistical learning tasks in sequence: first segmenting the words from continuous speech, and subsequently discovering the permissible orderings of the words. Given a single set of input, infants were able to acquire multiple levels of structure, suggesting that multiple levels of representation (initially syllable-level combinations, subsequently word-level combinations) can emerge during the course of learning.