Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #1667

Linguist Dr. Aris Thorne hypothesizes that infants do not merely memorize grammatical phrases through passive exposure; rather, they possess an innate statistical learning mechanism that computes transitional probabilities between adjacent syllables to detect word boundaries. To evaluate this hypothesis, researchers exposed 8-month-old infants to a continuous stream of synthesized nonsense syllables ('bidakupadotigolabubidaku...') with no pauses or pitch accents. The only cues to word boundaries were the transitional probabilities: within a word (e.g., 'bi-da-ku'), the probability was 1.0, whereas between words, it dropped to 0.33. Which finding, if true, would most directly support Thorne's hypothesis?