Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-pd9xq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-11T13:09:46.930Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

When do infants begin recognizing familiar words in sentences?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2012

RORY A. DEPAOLIS ,
MARILYN M. VIHMAN  and
TAMAR KEREN-PORTNOY
RORY A. DEPAOLIS*
Affiliation:
James Madison University
MARILYN M. VIHMAN
Affiliation:
University of York
TAMAR KEREN-PORTNOY
Affiliation:
University of York
*
Address for correspondence: Rory A. DePaolis, Communication Sciences and Disorders, James Madison University, MSC #4304, Harrisonburg, VA 22807. tel: (540) 568-3869. e-mail: depaolra@jmu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that by 11 but not by 10 months infants recognize words that have become familiar from everyday life independently of the experimental setting. This study explored the ability of 10-, 11-, and 12-month-old infants to recognize familiar words in sentential context, without experimental training. The headturn preference procedure was used to contrast passages containing words likely to be familiar to the infants with passages containing words unlikely to have been previously heard. Two stimulus words were inserted near the beginning and end of each of a set of simple sentence frames. The ability to recognize the familiar words within sentences emerged only at 12 months of age. The contrast between segmentation abilities as they emerge as a result of everyday exposure to language, as assessed here, and those abilities as measured in studies in which words are experimentally trained is discussed in terms of memory-based mechanisms.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 226 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This work was funded by a Marie Curie Incoming Fellowship. Special thanks to Fran Garrad-Cole and Rebecca Dodgson for running the headturn experiments.

References

REFERENCES

Aslin, R. N., Woodward, J. Z., LaMendola, N. P. & Bever, T. G. (1996). Models of word segmentation in fluent maternal speech to infants. In Morgan, J. L. & Demuth, K. (eds.), Signal to syntax: bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, 117–34. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J. L., Golinkoff, R. M. & Rathbun, K. (2005). Mommy and me: familiar names help launch babies into speech-stream segmentation. Psychological Science 16, 298–304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R. & Siskind, J. M. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition 81, B33–B44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Francis, W. N. & Kucera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.Google Scholar
Hallé, P. & de Boysson-Bardies, B. (1994). Emergence of an early receptive lexicon: infants' recognition of words. Infant Behavior & Development 17, 119–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallé, P. & de Boysson-Bardies, B. (1996). The format of representation of recognized words in infants' early receptive lexicon. Infant Behavior & Development 19, 463–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, A., Plunkett, K. & Schafer, G. (2000). Infant vocabulary development assessed with a British CDI. Journal of Child Language 27, 689–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartshorn, K., Rovee-Collier, C., Gerhardstein, P., Bhatt, R. S., Wondoloski, T. L., Klein, P., Gilch, J, Wurtzel, N. & Campos-de-Carvalho, M. (1998a). The ontogeny of long-term memory over the first year-and-a-half of life. Developmental Psychobiology 32, 69–89.3.0.CO;2-Q>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartshorn, K., Rovee-Collier, C., Gerhardstein, P., Bhatt, R. S., Klein, P. J., Aaron, F., Wondoloski, T. L. & Wurtzel, N. (1998b). Developmental changes in the specificity of memory over the first year of life. Developmental Psychobiology 3, 61–78.3.0.CO;2-Q>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houston, D. M. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2000). The role of talker-specific information in word segmentation by infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 26, 1570–82.Google ScholarPubMed
Houston, D. M. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). Infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words and voices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 29, 1143–54.Google ScholarPubMed
Hsu, V. C., Rovee-Collier, C., Hill, D. L., Grodkiewicz, J. & Joh, A. S. (2005). Effects of priming duration on retention over the first 1½ years of life. Developmental Psychobiology 47, 43–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W. & Aslin, R. N. (1995). Infants' detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology 29, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W. & Hohne, E. A. (1997). Infants' memory for spoken words. Science 277, 1984–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D. M. & Newsome, M. (1999). The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology 39, 159–207.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kemler-Nelson, D. G., Jusczyk, P. W., Mandel, D. R., Myers, J., Turk, A. & Gerken, L. (1995). The head turn preference procedure for testing auditory perception. Infant Behavior and Development 18, 111–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., Pelucch, B. & Saffran, J. R. (2011). Isolated words enhance statistical language learning in infancy. Developmental Science 14, 1323–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mandel, D. R., Jusczyk, P. W. & Pisoni, D. B. (1995). Infants' recognition of the sound patterns of their own names. Psychological Science 6, 314–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mandel-Emer, D. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). What's in a name? How infants respond to some familiar sound patterns. In Houston, D., Seidl, A., Hollich, G., Johnson, E. & Jusczyk, A. (eds.), Jusczyk Lab Final Report. Retrieved from http://hincapie.psych.purdue.edu/Jusczyk.Google Scholar
Rovee-Collier, C. (1995). Time windows in cognitive development. Developmental Psychology 31, 147–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rovee-Collier, C., Hayne, H. & Colombo, M. (2001). The development of implicit and explicit memory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Shi, R., Werker, J. F. & Cutler, A. (2006). Recognition and representation of function words in English-learning infants. Infancy 10, 187–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh, L. (2008). Influences of high and low variability on infant word recognition. Cognition 106, 883–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singh, L., Morgan, J. L. & White, K. S. (2004). Preference and processing: the role of speech affect in early spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 173–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swingley, D. (2005). 11-month-olds' knowledge of how familiar words sound. Developmental Science 8, 432–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vihman, M. M., Nakai, S., DePaolis, R. A. & Hallé, P. (2004). The role of accentual pattern in early lexical representation. Journal of Memory and Language 50, 336–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Thierry, G., Lum, J., Keren-Portnoy, T. & Martin, P. (2007). Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh, and English–Welsh bilingual infants. Applied Psycholinguistics 28, 475–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar