Electrophysiological correlates of word meanings in 14‐month‐old human infants

Abstract

Two studies were conducted in a preliminary attempt to determine whether electrophysiological procedures could be used to study early word learning in young infants. In Experiment 1, auditory evoked responses (AERs) were recorded from the frontal, temporal, and parietal scalp regions of a group of 14‐month‐old infants while they listened to a series of words. The brain responses reliably discriminated between words the infants were thought (by their parents and two independent raters) to understand versus those that they did not appear to know. A second experiment was conducted with a different group of infants to determine whether familiarity with the sounds alone could produce similar brainwave differences. This study, although showing that the brain‐wave patterns could discriminate familiar from novel speech‐sound sequences, did not demonstrate findings identical to those reported for differences in word understanding. These data are the first indication that AERs can be used to detect differences in word meanings in infants.