Can a Click be a Word?: Infants' Learning of Non‐Native Words

May, Lillian; Werker, Janet F.

doi:10.1111/infa.12048

Cited by 39 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…For labels containing non‐native sounds, referential information may also support greater attention to detail, including attention to sound contrasts that are not lexically contrastive in the native language(s). In the absence of referential cues, learning appears more constrained (Hay et al., ; May & Werker, ; Singh et al., ). In the present work, the absence of referential cues also revealed extended flexibility in label learning for bilingual infants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The supportive context may have promoted attention to detail in the input (Fennell & Waxman, ), thereby supporting (and perhaps overestimating) infants' attention to the non‐native use of pitch contour in the new words. Consistent with this notion, May and Werker () found that a task with referential cues supported infants' learning of labels containing non‐native click contrasts, whereas a Switch task lacking referential cues did not.…”

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confidence: 85%

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Flexibility in Bilingual Infants' Word Learning

Estes

Hay

2015

Child Development

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The present experiments tested bilingual infants' developmental narrowing for the interpretation of sounds that form words. These studies addressed how language specialization proceeds when the environment provides varied and divergent input. Experiment 1 (N = 32) demonstrated that bilingual 14- and 19-month-olds learned a pair of object labels consisting of the same syllable produced with distinct pitch contours (rising and falling). Infants' native languages did not use pitch contour to differentiate words. In Experiment 2 (N = 16), 22-month-old bilinguals failed to learn the labels. These results conflict with the developmental trajectory of monolinguals, who fail to learn pitch contour contrasts as labels at 17-19 months (Hay, Graf Estes, Wang, & Saffran, 2015). Bilingual infants exhibited a prolonged period of flexibility in their interpretation of potential word forms.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 85%

Flexibility in Bilingual Infants' Word Learning

Estes

Hay

2015

Child Development

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“…For signals that are part of infants’ initial template (e.g., human and nonhuman primate vocalizations), exposure alone appears to be sufficient to maintain or reinstate the link at 6 or 7 months of age. In contrast, for signals that fall outside of infants’ initial template (e.g., tones, backward speech), a different route is required: Infants will link otherwise arbitrary signals to meaning only if they have been embedded within a social communicative exchange (Ferguson & Waxman, 2016; May & Werker, 2014; Namy & Waxman, 1998; Woodward & Hoyne, 1999). This leads to a clear prediction: Even prolonged exposure to such signals (either tone sequences or backward speech) is unlikely to lead infants to link them to cognition unless the signals are introduced within a rich social, communicative context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to the calls of the wild: The role of experience in linking language and cognition in young infants

Perszyk

Waxman

2016

Cognition

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Well before they understand their first words, infants have begun to link language and cognition. This link is initially broad: At 3 months, listening to both human and nonhuman primate vocalizations supports infants’ object categorization, a building block of cognition. But by 6 months, the link has narrowed: Only human vocalizations support categorization. What mechanisms underlie this rapid tuning process? Here, we document the crucial role of infants’ experience as infants tune this link to cognition. Merely exposing infants to nonhuman primate vocalizations permits them to preserve, rather than sever, the link between these signals and categorization. Exposing infants to backward speech—a signal that fails to support categorization in the first year of life—does not have this advantage. This new evidence illuminates the central role of early experience as infants specify which signals, from an initially broad set, they will continue to link to core cognitive capacities.

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“…For example, younger infants more readily learn a range of sounds and gestures as object labels when the labels conflict with the forms of native language words (Hay et al, 2015; May & Werker, 2014; Namy & Waxman, 1998; Woodward & Hoyne, 1999). A commonality across these studies is that the apparent decline in performance across development reflects increasing native language sophistication and specialization.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding patterns and learning words: Infant phonotactic knowledge is associated with vocabulary size

Estes

Gluck

Grimm

2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Native language statistical regularities about allowable phoneme combinations (i.e., phonotactic patterns) may provide learners with cues to support word learning. The current research investigated the association between infants’ native language phonotactic knowledge and their word learning progress, as measured by vocabulary size. In the experiment, 19-month-old infants listened to a corpus of nonce words that contained novel phonotactic patterns. All words began with ‘‘illegal” consonant clusters that cannot occur in native (English) words. The rationale for the task was that infants with fragile phonotactic knowledge should exhibit stronger learning of the novel illegal phonotactic patterns than infants with robust phonotactic knowledge. We found that infants with smaller vocabularies showed stronger phonotactic learning than infants with larger vocabularies even after accounting for general cognition. We propose that learning about native language structure may promote vocabulary development by providing a foundation for word learning; infants with smaller vocabularies may have weaker support from phonotactics than infants with larger vocabularies. Furthermore, stored vocabulary knowledge may promote the detection of phonotactic patterns even during infancy.

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Can a Click be a Word?: Infants' Learning of Non‐Native Words

Cited by 39 publications

References 47 publications

Flexibility in Bilingual Infants' Word Learning

Flexibility in Bilingual Infants' Word Learning

Listening to the calls of the wild: The role of experience in linking language and cognition in young infants

Finding patterns and learning words: Infant phonotactic knowledge is associated with vocabulary size

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