When do infants begin recognizing familiar words in sentences?

Abstract

Article:DePaolis, R.A., Vihman, Marilyn orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-4840 and Keren-Portnoy, Tamar orcid.org/0000-0002- 7258-2404 (2014) 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.

British English infants segment words only with exaggerated infant-directed speech stimuli

“…Perhaps in York and Plymouth there are extra-experimental features that differ from those in the American labs and that we have failed to identify as relevant to the experimental findings (see Maurer, 1993, for such an example with early cross-modal visual preferences). We should emphasise, however, that using the same implementation of the basic head-turn preference paradigm, both our labs have produced significant publishable findings on topics other than segmentation (Butler et al, 2011;Delle Luche et al, 2014;DePaolis et al, 2014).…”

Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development

“…For comparison, note that infants’ memory for words known from the home, not trained in the laboratory, is reliably seen experimentally at 11 (but not 9) months (Vihman et al ., ), despite the fact that everything about the test situation is unfamiliar – the voice presenting the stimuli, the darkened test booth, the disembodied speech – and no contextual information is available to prime recognition. Comparable long‐term representation of word forms embedded in sentences emerges only about a month later (DePaolis et al ., ).…”

“…Untrained word‐form recognition (without the support of visual images), which reflects long‐term representation of words heard frequently in everyday life (DePaolis, Vihman, & Keren‐Portnoy, ), may precede full word comprehension (Hallé & de Boysson‐Bardies, ; Swingley, ). There is no behavioural evidence of such recognition at 9 months, while at 10 months the experimental effects are variable and related to infant production experience: infants who are consistently and stably producing one or more consonants in repeated recordings perform at the extreme end of a scale of ‘preference ratios’ (proportion of looking time to common or ‘familiar’ words out of total looking time) – either showing a familiarity or a novelty response; those not yet producing consonants consistently perform at chance, showing no significant preference for either set of words (DePaolis, Keren‐Portnoy & Vihman, ).…”

Making Sense of Infant Familiarity and Novelty Responses to Words at Lexical Onset

“…It could be argued that each new type of stimulus requires a methodological rethink as to how the parameters will affect infant responses. For example, although words are often explored in novelty/familiarity paradigms either in isolation (e.g., Hallé and de Boysson-Bardies, 1994 , 1996 ; Vihman et al, 2004 ; Swingley, 2005 ) or in passages of sentences containing target words (e.g., Jusczyk and Aslin, 1995 ; Jusczyk et al, 1999 ; Bortfeld et al, 2005 ; Singh, 2008 ; Singh et al, 2012 ; DePaolis et al, 2014 ), there are few methodological examinations of familiarity and novelty as they apply specifically to the developing lexicon. One exception is a computational model of factors affecting word segmentation in AHPP experiments ( Bergmann et al, 2013 ).…”