Jenny Saffran

Did pioneering work showing that young infants can infer complex statistical patterns from data and exploring the contributions this kind of learning makes to language and cognitive development. Her contributions are both methodological and theoretical, developing techniques for exploring even very young children's learning by exposing them to artificial languages with particular statistical properties, and then developing sophisticated models of how those statistics could translate into higher-order linguistic (and musical) structure. This work led to an entire new sub-field of work exploring statistical learning in infants, with results that really revolutionized thinking about human learning capacities.