Psychology Commons^™

The Relationship Between Auditory Working Memory And Statistical Learning In Infancy, Mckenzie Mullins Sheets

Masters Theses

Although previous research indicates that there is a strong relationship between auditory working memory and language skills in children and adults, no studies have explored this relationship in infancy. Working memory develops shortly before the onset of many language abilities in infancy, including the ability to use statistical information to segment words from speech. To track frequent syllable co-occurrences within a speech stream to locate word boundaries, infants must hold auditory information in their mind as one syllable quickly displaces another. Thus, it seems likely that auditory working memory plays a role in statistical learning. In the current study, I …