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Abstract
The rapidity with which infants come to understand language and events in their surroundings
has prompted speculation concerning innate knowledge structures that guide language
acquisition and object knowledge. Recently, however, evidence has emerged that by
8 months, infants can extract statistical patterns in auditory input that are based
on transitional probabilities defining the sequencing of the input's components (Science
274 (1996) 1926). This finding suggests powerful learning mechanisms that are functional
in infancy, and raises questions about the domain generality of such mechanisms. We
habituated 2-, 5-, and 8-month-old infants to sequences of discrete visual stimuli
whose ordering followed a statistically predictable pattern. The infants subsequently
viewed the familiar pattern alternating with a novel sequence of identical stimulus
components, and exhibited significantly greater interest in the novel sequence at
all ages. These results provide support for the likelihood of domain general statistical
learning in infancy, and imply that mechanisms designed to detect structure inherent
in the environment may play an important role in cognitive development.