Day 34 of 150 Pattern Difficulty 3/10
Infants segment words by tracking syllable co-occurrence
Quick answer
Infants segment words by tracking syllable co-occurrence. Today's question (Statistical word segmentation) asks about a finding from Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. in 1996. The correct option is Transitional probabilities between syllables — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996) showed that 8-month-old infants can extract word boundaries from continuous speech using:
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: C — Transitional probabilities between syllables
Infants listened to two minutes of an artificial language streamed without pauses — only the statistical regularity that some syllables co-occurred reliably ("bidaku") while others crossed word boundaries ("kupada"). Tested on novel sequences, the infants distinguished words from part-words, indicating implicit tracking of transitional probability. The finding reframed early language acquisition as a domain-general statistical-learning process, not a speech-specific module, and seeded a literature linking infants, adults, songbirds, and primates.
About the source
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
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