ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a language learning challenge faced by infants: discovering the sounds in language, finding words in continuous speech, mapping words to meaning, and learning rudimentary grammar. It provides an overview of the kind of statistical regularities available in the input and review a representative sampling of the evidence that suggests that infants can track those statistics. The chapter discusses what is known about how individual differences in statistical learning are related to language development in both typical and atypical infant and child populations. It explores the reader a flavor of the ways that statistical learning in infancy is studied in the lab and to highlight evidence to suggest that it may account for some meaningful individual differences in language acquisition. As infants gain experience with the prosodic and phonotactic patterns of words in their native language, they may come to rely less on sequential statistics to find words in speech, in favor of language-specific cues.
