The Limits of Infants’ Early Word Learning

Abstract

In this series of experiments, we tested the limits of young infants' word learning and generalization abilities in light of recent findings reporting sophisticated word learning abilities in the first year of life. Ten-month-old infants were trained with two word-object pairs and tested with either the same or different members of the corresponding categories. In Experiment 1, infants showed successful learning of the word-object associations, when trained and tested with a single exemplar from each category. In Experiment 2, infants were presented with multiple within-category items during training but failed to learn the word-object associations. In Experiment 3, infants were presented with a single exemplar from each category during training, and failed to generalize words to a new category exemplar. However, when infants were trained with items from perceptually and conceptually distinct categories in Experiment 4, they showed weak evidence for generalization of words to novel members of the corresponding categories. It is suggested that word learning in the first year begins as the formation of simple associations between words and objects that become enriched as experience with objects, words and categories accumulates across development. Infants begin to solve the puzzle of language learning from a very young age. Even before the onset of speech, in the second half of the first year, the young language learner is equipped with crucial phonetic/phonological abilities, such as fine-tuning to language-specific phonological contrasts (Werker & Tees, 1984), the ability to segment words in fluent speech contexts (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) and sensitivity to the prosodic and phonotactic characteristics of their native language (Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001). These fundamental abilities allow infants to take on the challenge of learning word-object associations well before the onset of full-fledged productive language skills (Gershkoff

In the absence of visual input: Electrophysiological evidence of infants’ mapping of labels onto auditory objects

“…Our daily lives are full of sensory input from different modalities and language provides us with the means to describe those rich experiences, with words for visual, auditory, olfactory and haptic experiences such as flower (visual), thunder (auditory), stench (olfactory), and tickle (haptic). Despite this rich and multimodal environment, research on how we acquire words for entities and events has mostly focused on labeling objects in the visual modality (e.g., Borgström et al, 2015a ; Friedrich and Friederici, 2008 ; Horst and Samuelson, 2008 ; Junge et al, 2012 ; Pruden et al, 2006 ; Smith and Yu, 2008 ; Taxitari et al, 2019 ; Torkildsen et al, 2008 , 2007 ; Werker et al, 1998 ). This imbalance may originate from the larger number of words for visible things in many languages.…”

Infants exploit vowels to label objects and actions from continuous audiovisual stimuli

“…This protocol was used to reduce the infants’ cognitive demands because the learning of new word-visual referent associations learning at the laboratory has been described as hard even in non-fluent contexts 40 . Previous studies in young infants reported that more complex tasks such as word-object categorization are accompanied by lower accuracy and gaze’s long latency starting 1.5 s after the onset of the object presentation 40 . The long latency to switch the gaze toward the selected image we observed in all our experiments supports this idea.…”

Word-object and action-object association learning across early development

“…These findings stand in slight contrast to the literature on word learning. Research suggests that when presented with only a word for an object, children as young as 9 to 10 months of age learn to associate words with objects ( [38], but see [39] that such learning is contingent on a number of factors, e.g., similarity of the two objects presented). These studies, however, only presented infants with word-object associations and not both word-and action-object associations.…”