Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In auditory statistical learning, children are sensitive to the transitional structure of their language environment. Vari-ability and stability of utterances in the language environment are important properties of statistical learning but are currentlyunderstudied across laboratory and naturalistic research contexts. In this study, we quantify variability and stability in the lan-guage environment of children as measured by amount of information within the temporal structure of caregivers’ utterances. Inthis work we present a new method for understanding information signatures in the temporal structure of parent-child free playcontexts and document information signatures of caregiver utterances at multiple timescales. Our results suggest informationsignatures of parental utterances increase across development (9-24 months), but decrease within individual play sessions (5-6minutes). We speculate that the dynamics of information signatures varies across multiple timescales. Possible implications ofthe observed information signatures inherent in caregivers’ naming of objects to their young children are explored.