A decade of research suggests that infants readily detect patterns in their environment, but it is unclear how such learning changes with experience. We tested how prior experience influences sensitivity to statistical regularities in an artificial language. Although 12-month-old infants learn adjacent relationships between word categories, they do not track nonadjacent relationships until 15 months. We asked whether 12-month-old infants could generalize experience with adjacent dependencies to nonadjacent ones. Infants were familiarized to an artificial language either containing or lacking adjacent dependencies between word categories and were subsequently habituated to novel nonadjacent dependencies. Prior experience with adjacent dependencies resulted in enhanced learning of the nonadjacent dependencies. Female infants showed better discrimination than males did, which is consistent with earlier reported sex differences in verbal memory capacity. The findings suggest that prior experience can bootstrap infants' learning of difficult language structure and that learning mechanisms are powerfully affected by experience.

中文翻译：

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十二个月大的婴儿受益于先前的统计学习经验


十年的研究表明，婴儿很容易发现环境中的模式，但尚不清楚这种学习如何随着经验而变化。我们用人工语言测试了先前的经验如何影响对统计规律的敏感性。尽管 12 个月大的婴儿可以学习单词类别之间的相邻关系，但直到 15 个月大时他们才会跟踪不相邻的关系。我们询问 12 个月大的婴儿是否可以将相邻依赖关系的经验概括为不相邻依赖关系的经验。婴儿熟悉了包含或缺乏单词类别之间的相邻依赖关系的人工语言，随后习惯于新的不相邻依赖关系。先前对相邻依赖关系的经验可以增强对非相邻依赖关系的学习。女婴比男婴表现出更好的辨别力，这与之前报道的言语记忆能力的性别差异一致。研究结果表明，先前的经验可以引导婴儿学习困难的语言结构，并且学习机制受到经验的强烈影响。