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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
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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 

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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

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