Statistical learning and sensorimotor associations: dual pathways in infant speech perception

Regarding the development of speech perception, statistical learning and sensorimotor coupling represent two important theoretical approaches: the former emphasizes environmental distributional information, while the latter highlights speech motor modulation. Using 80 eight-month-old infants in a Chinese language environment as participants, an alternating/same visual fixation paradigm was employed to separately manipulate distributional information (unimodal/bimodal) and tongue-tip motor feedback (inhibited/permitted), examining their effects on infants' discrimination performance for the Hindi consonant contrast /ɖ/-/d̪/ and acoustically matched non-speech stimuli. The results showed that after bimodal distributional input, infants exhibited discrimination sensitivity to the target consonant contrast, whereas under the unimodal condition no stable discrimination was observed; permitting...