Rate My Professor Jenny Saffran

Jenny Saffran is the Letters & Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she joined the faculty in 1997. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1997 and founded the Infant Learning Lab at the Waisman Center in 1998, directing research that has tested approximately 27,000 infants. Saffran's work centers on cognitive development in infancy, with a focus on language acquisition mechanisms. Her seminal studies reveal that 8-month-old infants employ statistical learning to identify word boundaries in continuous speech by tracking probabilistic patterns in sound sequences, laying the groundwork for understanding how domain-general learning processes underpin language mastery. This research extends to the roles of stress cues, infant-directed speech, and distributional probabilities in word segmentation, as well as parallels between language and music perception.

Saffran's investigations also address language learning in children with developmental disabilities, including autism spectrum disorder, as a principal investigator on the NIH-funded Little Listeners Project examining real-time language comprehension in toddlers. Key publications include "Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants" (1996), "Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults" (1999), "Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues" (1996), "Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants" (1998), and "Infant statistical learning" (2018). Her contributions have earned election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the inaugural Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building, the Kellett Mid-Career Faculty Researcher Award, and appointment as Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in 2018. Saffran teaches undergraduate seminars to graduate courses, directs the Psychology Department's Honors Program, and chairs committees on teaching excellence. Her lab featured in the Netflix docuseries "Babies," amplifying impact on developmental psychology and cognitive science.