Language Acquisition Exam 2 Practice

Statistical learning in language acquisition is about how infants pick up regular patterns from the speech they hear. They don’t rely on explicit instruction or reinforcement; instead, they notice how often one sound follows another. This tracking of distributional regularities, especially transitional probabilities between syllables, helps them identify where word boundaries are and learn recurring language patterns. For example, when streams of syllables are structured so certain syllables tend to occur together, infants treat those high-probability boundaries as words, showing they’ve learned from the statistical structure of the input. The other options miss this core idea: language learning isn’t driven by explicit teaching, isn’t explained by reinforcement alone, and isn’t organized first around semantics before phonology.