How do young children learn to organize the statistics of communicative input across milliseconds and months? Developmental science has made progress in elucidating how infants learn patterns in language and how infant-directed speech is engineered to ease short-timescale processing, but less is known about how children link perceptual experiences across multiple levels of processing within an interaction (from syllables to stories) and across development. In this article, we propose that three domains of research—statistical summary, neural processing hierarchies, and neural coupling—will be fruitful in uncovering the dynamic exchange of information between children and adults, both in the moment and in aggregate. In particular, we discuss how the study of brain-to-brain and brain-to-behavior coupling between children and adults will advance the field’s understanding of how children’s neural representations become aligned with the increasingly complex statistics of communication across timescales.

幼儿如何学会跨毫秒和数月组织交流输入的统计数据？发展科学在阐明婴儿如何学习语言模式以及如何设计针对婴儿的语音以简化短时间尺度处理方面取得了进展，但对于儿童如何在交互中将感知体验跨多个处理级别（从音节到故事）和跨发展。在本文中，我们提出三个研究领域——统计汇总、神经处理层次结构和神经耦合——将在揭示儿童和成人之间的动态信息交换方面卓有成效，无论是在当下还是总体上。特别是，