All theories of language development suggest that learning is constrained. However, theories differ on whether these constraints arise from language-specific processes or have domain-general origins such as the characteristics of human perception and information processing. The current experiments explored constraints on statistical learning of patterns, such as the phonotactic patterns of an infants’ native language. Infants in these experiments were presented with a visual analog of a phonotactic learning task used by J. R. Saffran and E. D. Thiessen (2003). Saffran and Thiessen found that infants’ phonotactic learning was constrained such that some patterns were learned more easily than other patterns. The current results indicate that infants’ learning of visual patterns shows the same constraints as infants’ learning of phonotactic patterns. This is consistent with theories suggesting that constraints arise from domain-general sources and, as such, should operate over many kinds of stimuli in addition to linguistic stimuli.
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机译：语言发展的所有理论都表明学习受到了限制。但是，关于这些约束是源于特定语言的过程还是源于领域一般的起源（例如人类感知和信息处理的特征），理论有所不同。当前的实验探索了对模式的统计学习的限制，例如婴儿母语的语音变位模式。在这些实验中，给婴儿提供了J. R. Saffran和E. D. Thiessen（2003）使用的音律学习任务的视觉类似物。萨夫兰（Saffran）和蒂森（Thiessen）发现，婴儿的音律学习受到限制，因此某些模式比其他模式更容易学习。当前的结果表明，婴儿对视觉模式的学习与婴儿对音速方法的学习具有相同的限制。这与以下理论是一致的，即理论认为约束来自领域通用资源，因此，除了语言刺激外，还应该对多种刺激起作用。
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