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Adult Research at the CCL

STATISTICAL LEARNING


What abilities do learners bring to the table in the early stages of language acquisition? A growing body of research suggests that a foundational component of language acquisition is the ability to track and compute structural regularities within the input. This ability, broadly termed statistical learning, has been demonstrated in both infant and adult learners and can be deployed for linguistic input as well as input from other modalities. There is evidence that at least some of the computations performed by humans are phylogenetically preserved, as they appear also in nonhumans.


One of the goals of our lab is to further explore how statistical learning operates with an eye toward understanding how these computations may be realized in the face of variability that comes in the form of noise, competing cues, and multi sensory input. One particular interest in the lab is the consequences of bilingualism for statistical learning mechanisms. Specifically, we ask how learners are able to acquire multiple statistical inputs and the conditions under which learners form multiple statistical representations.