Rate My Professor Jenny Saffran

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.