YOUR DEVELOPMENTit’s the approach that most adults bring to these kinds of tasks. A toddler
would also notice that players mostly stay at the back, but because of an
infant’s uninhibited thinking style, he or she will consistently predict
the player will stay on the baseline. In this context, the toddler’s crude
approach will be right more often than a more nuanced strategy.
Thompson-Schill’s team argued that this advantage translates to
real-life infant challenges, such as language learning. Infants listening
to adult speech will notice rules, only to hear them frequently broken.
But thanks to their “maximization” approach, they tend to latch onto
the rules and ignore the caveats, which is ideal when taking the first
steps towards acquiring language. The psychologists Carla Hudson-
Kam and Elissa Newport provided evidence for this in a study in which
they exposed children and adults to a deliberately capricious artificial
language. Children, but not adults, were found to zoom in on an unreli-
able rule and generalize from it.
In a series of classic experiments in the late 1980s, Walter Mischel of
Columbia University tested the development of children’s self-control.
Clever little scientists
Babies and young children are so adept at learning because they
approach the world like clever little scientists weighing up probabilities
and statistics. This can be demonstrated in the context of language
learning, where infants face the daunting challenge of identifying
word boundaries in speech. Sometimes fluent speakers pause between
words, but a lot of the time they just let one word roll into another.
One way to identify where a word ends and another begins is to pay
attention to probabilities. Consider the phrase “hello Michael”, in which
“lo” comes after “hel” but before “mi”. Baby Michael would hear “lo” come
after “hel” much more often than he would hear either “lo” precede “mi”
or other sounds precede “lo”. This consistent pattern would reveal to
him that “lo” somehow belongs to “hel”, forming a word.
This is more than just a theory. A 1996 study by Jenny Saffran at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison revealed that babies as young as
eight months really do notice these statistical contingencies between
syllables. When the researchers played the babies a repeating string
of three nonsense-syllables, they grew bored just as you’d expect. But
crucially, this boredom was broken when the babies were exposed to
the same syllables paired together in a different order. It’s as if, after
just two minutes, the babies had already developed a sense of how
likely one syllable was to follow another, and their interest was piqued
when this probability changed.