Running Head: SEGMENTATION AND WORD-OBJECT ASSOCIATION Effects of visual information on adults’ and infants’ auditory statistical learning

Infant and adult learners are able to identify word boundaries in fluent speech using statistical information. Similarly, learners are able to use statistical information to identify word-object associations. Successful language learning requires both feats. In this series of experiments, we presented adults and infants with audio-visual input from which it was possible to identify both word boundaries and word-object relations. Adult learners benefited when both learning problems were simultaneously present, as did 20month-old infants. Eight-month-olds performed equivalently when words in fluent speech were associated with visual objects, whether those objects were regularly associated with words or not. Adults, like 8-month-olds, did not benefit from regular audio-visual correspondences when they were tested with tones, rather than linguistic input. These differences in learning outcomes across age and domain suggest that both developmental and stimulus-based constraints play a role in the output of statistical