The rhythmic underpinnings of statistical learning in speech segmentation

Infants face the challenge of segmenting continuous speech into words and likely use statistical learning to aid this process. Individual variation in statistical learning ability at an early age is associated with later vocabulary development and language disorders. An outstanding question is how such individual differences in statistical learning arise. Rhythmic abilities are hypothesized to drive these differences, as well as general cognitive abilities (e.g. pattern recognition, working memory). In my PhD project I investigate if rhythmic and/or cognitive abilities predict individual performance on statistical learning tasks. This will provide new insights on language acquisition and possibly early detection of language disorders.

In Februari 2024, the Dutch newspaper NRC wrote an article about my research in the Babylab, as part of my PhD project [article in Dutch]: "Met gevoel voor ritme maken baby’s taal van woorden als ‘golabu’ en ‘padoti’"