Preverbal Infants Discover Statistical Word Patterns at Similar Rates as Adults: Evidence From Neural Entrainment
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discovery of words in continuous speech is one of the first challenges faced by infants during language acquisition. This process is partially facilitated by statistical learning, the ability to discover and encode relevant patterns in the environment. Here, we used an electroencephalogram (EEG) index of neural entrainment to track 6-month-olds’ ( N = 25) segmentation of words from continuous speech. Infants’ neural entrainment to embedded words increased logarithmically over the learning period, consistent with a perceptual shift from isolated syllables to wordlike units. Moreover, infants’ neural entrainment during learning predicted postlearning behavioral measures of word discrimination ( n = 18). Finally, the logarithmic increase in entrainment to words was comparable in infants and adults, suggesting that infants and adults follow similar learning trajectories when tracking probability information among speech sounds. Statistical-learning effects in infants and adults may reflect overlapping neural mechanisms, which emerge early in life and are maintained throughout the life span.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it