Jenny Saffran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying how infants use statistical learning – the detection of pattern and regularities in the environment, to learn about the structure of language. Language learning is a highly complex problem and is not a trivial task for an infant, but behavioral experiments from Jenny’s labs have led to many insights into how infants solve this task.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:38) – What is language
(08:33) – Structure of human languages
(19:58) – Language and intelligence
(23:57) – Is language innate
(40:44) – How babies learn language
(57:10) – Learning different languages
(1:07:12) – Psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists
(1:10:21) – Studying language in babies
(1:15:33) – Jenny’s academic journey
(1:23:30) – Natural language processing
(1:31:44) – Advice for young scientists
NOTES
Seeing faces is necessary for face-patch formation (Arcaro et al., 2017)
