Language & WorldHow it works
How babies cut words out of a continuous sound stream.
Spoken language has no pauses between words. Babies solve this with statistics: they track which syllables tend to follow each other. Inside a word the transition probability is high (in the made-up word 'bidaku', 'bi' is always followed by 'da'), at word boundaries it's low. In a 1996 experiment, 8-month-olds needed 2 minutes of artificial language to find its 'words'.
Useful: Talk to babies a lot and in full sentences; the statistics need data.
Source: doi.org