Saffran J R, Aslin R N, Newport E L
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
Science. 1996 Dec 13;274(5294):1926-8. doi: 10.1126/science.274.5294.1926.
Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.
学习者依靠经验独立和经验依赖机制的结合从环境中提取信息。语言习得涉及这两种机制，但大多数理论家强调经验独立机制的相对重要性。本研究表明，语言习得的一项基本任务，即从流畅的语音中分割出单词，8个月大的婴儿仅根据相邻语音之间的统计关系就能完成。此外，这种单词分割仅基于两分钟接触的统计学习，这表明婴儿拥有一种强大的机制来计算语言输入的统计特性。
