How do children learn the forms and meanings of words?

C. Frank, M. .

Babies can make use of distributional information through "statistical learning," which is often characterized as a passive process of implicit learning. But early language learning takes place in a fundamentally social, fundamentally interactive context. In this talk, I will argue that statistical learning abilities operate within this social context as part of an active process of interpretation and exploration by children. In addition, the statistical inferences that learners can make are both more accurate and more efficient when they assume that a communicative structure underlies the statistical data they observe. Thus, researchers studying statistical learning should consider how it is integrated with children's early social orientation, which structures both their inferences and their experiences in fundamental ways.