Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The first section of the revised Handbook has been expanded to take account of recent developments in infancy research. One of the most remarkable findings from the last decade has been the statistical learning power of the infant brain. By processing sensory features of the input, and correlations and dependencies between these features, the infant brain basically learns about dynamic spatio-temporal structure, across modalities. Some relevant data are discussed in the chapters by Quinn; Baillargeon Li, Gertner, and Wu; Waxman and Leddon; and Bauer, Larkina, and Deocampo. Sensory statistical learning enables 2-month-old infants to learn visual transitional probabilities between abstract geometric shapes ( Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002 ), and 3-month-old infants to learn to distinguish vehicles and animals on the basis of motion cues alone (when watching point light displays, Arterberry & Bornstein, 2001 ). Learning auditory conditional probabilities enables infants to extract structural properties from language input, for example the phonotactic patterns of language (the sounds that make up the language, and the orders in which they can be combined, see Tomasello, chapter 9 ), and the phonetic elements that comprise a particular language (e.g., Kuhl, 2004 ). Neural systems that can learn the patterns or regularities in environmental input captured by conditional ... log in or subscribe to read full text