Human adults are adept at mitigating the influence of sensory uncertainty on task performance by integrating sensory cues with learned prior information, in a Bayes-optimal fashion. Previous research has shown that young children and infants are sensitive to environmental regularities, and that the ability to learn and use such regularities is…

Successful language acquisition hinges on organizing individual words into grammatical categories and learning the relationships between them, but the method by which children accomplish this task has been debated in the literature. One proposal is that learners use the shared distributional contexts in which words appear as a cue to their…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

A fundamental component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories. Previous literature has suggested a number of ways in which this categorization task might be accomplished. Here we ask whether the patterning of the words in a corpus of linguistic input ("distributional information") is sufficient, along with a…

The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses "uh"…

The associative learning account of how infants identify human motion rests on the assumption that this knowledge is derived from statistical regularities seen in the world. Yet, no catalog exists of what visual input infants receive of human motion, and of causal and self-propelled motion in particular. In this manuscript, we demonstrate that the…

Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial…

In many domains of cognitive processing there is strong support for bottom-up priority and delayed top-down (contextual) integration. We ask whether this applies to supra-lexical context that could potentially constrain lexical access. Previous findings of early context integration in word recognition have typically used constraints that can be…

Two experiments used the head-mounted eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of lexical activation in the face of a non-phonemic cue, talker variation. We found that lexical competition was attenuated by consistent talker differences between words that would otherwise be lexical competitors. In Experiment 1, some English cohort…

The sounds that make up spoken words are heard in a series and must be mapped rapidly onto words in memory because their elements, unlike those of visual words, cannot simultaneously exist or persist in time. Although theories agree that the dynamics of spoken word recognition are important, they differ in how they treat the nature of the…

Yoshida and Smith (this issue) provide one of the first attempts to overcome the most serious impediment to the use of head-mounted eye trackers with infants: Except in rare cases they are not light enough to be worn on an infant's head, or the infant does not tolerate looking through a half-silvered mirror that is hanging on a rigid stalk…

Human listeners can keep track of statistical regularities among temporally adjacent elements in both speech and musical streams. However, for speech streams, when statistical regularities occur among nonadjacent elements, only certain types of patterns are acquired. Here, using musical tone sequences, the authors investigate nonadjacent learning.…