Baby Data Mining?

Researchers performing cognitive experiments on toddlers claim that children acquire language through a process similar to data mining. The toddlers were shown a series of object pairs while recordings of two words were played. During each iteration, one of the words corresponded to one of the objects. Over time, the children were able to disambiguate the references and determine which words corresponded to which objects.

While the scientists claim this language learning method to be akin to data mining, to me it seems less like a statistical searching process and more like rule-based pattern recognition and association building.

via Slashdot