Dear colleagues, On December 4, the Developing Minds global online lecture series is proud to host Jenny Saffran from Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, speaking on: "Learning to understand: Statistical learning and language development“. Thursday, December 4, 2025 8:00 am CT (Central Time, USA) 2:00 pm UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) 15:00 CET (Central European Time) 23:00 JST (Japan Standard Time) The zoom link/credentials are: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/65360492761?pwd=E7EbBT8uMVWgyhBAYAJgLz33RH... Meeting-ID: 653 6049 2761 Kenncode: 352501 Abstract: Infants rapidly develop from being naïve listeners, who experience language as a sea of sounds, to understanding their native language(s). How does this remarkable learning process unfold? One potentially useful source of information lies in the statistical patterns that characterize natural languages, which signal structures ranging from phonemes to words to grammatical structures. Beyond merely tracking these patterns, how might infants use statistical regularities to support language development? In my presentation, I will explore the hypothesis that infants exploit statistical regularities in the service of efficiently processing information in their linguistic environments. Short Bio: Dr. Jenny Saffran has been on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison since she received her Ph.D. in 1997. Her research program focuses on how infants learn, particularly in the domain of language. She is a highly engaged teacher and mentor to students at all levels. Dr. Saffran is the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and teaching, including as the inaugural recipient of the Jeffrey Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building from the Cognitive Science Society. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. The talk will be recorded and made available for later viewing. For more information on the talk series and recordings of previous events, please visit: https://sites.google.com/view/developing-minds-series/home Best regards, Jochen Triesch -- Prof. Dr. Jochen Triesch Johanna Quandt Chair for Theoretical Life Sciences Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and Goethe University Frankfurt http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/~triesch/ Tel: +49 (0)69 798-47531 Fax: +49 (0)69 798-47611