Here, we show that infants show better segmentation when exposed to a skewed distribution, highlighting their facilitative role, and suggesting the widespread use of uniform distributions in lab-based studies may underestimate infants’ segmentation abilities.

Infants' word segmentation has been studied extensively in the lab, but almost all studies use uniform distributions, where each word appears equally often. This is very different from the skewed frequency distributions found in natural language.

Skewed distributions facilitate infants' word segmentation Infants can use statistical patterns to segment continuous speech into words, a crucial task in language acquisition. Experimental studies typically i…

Some happy science news (a small light in times of darkness). New paper out with @luciewolters.bsky.social and Mits Ota: : Skewed distributions facilitate infants’ word segmentation. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Super clear thread by @simonkirby.bsky.social about our new paper on whale song

What the science of baby-speak can tell us about whale songs A new study reveals that whale song and human languages share features that make them easier to learn.

My latest story for National Geographic, about the similarities between whale song and human language, featuring @inbalarnon.bsky.social, @simonkirby.bsky.social, @ellengarland.bsky.social, @masonyoungblood.bsky.social and @rferrericancho.bsky.social!

Whale song shows language-like statistical structure Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These...

SO very excited about new paper with @simonkirby.bsky.social and @ellengarland.bsky.social: We used infant-inspired tools to analyze eight years of humpback whale song, finding recurring parts with a Zipfian frequency distribution. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...