Abstract
Before the 6-months of age, infants succeed to learn words associated with objects and actions when the words are presented isolated or embedded in short utterances. It remains unclear whether such type of learning occurs from fluent audiovisual stimuli, although in natural environments the fluent audiovisual contexts are the default. In 4 experiments, we evaluated if 8-month-old infants could learn word-action and word-object associations from fluent audiovisual streams when the words conveyed either vowel or consonant harmony, two phonological cues that benefit word learning near 6 and 12 months of age, respectively. We found that infants learned both types of words, but only when the words contained vowel harmony. Because object- and action-words have been conceived as rudimentary representations of nouns and verbs, our results suggest that vowels contribute to shape the initial steps of the learning of lexical categories in preverbal infants.
Highlights
Before the 6-months of age, infants succeed to learn words associated with objects and actions when the words are presented isolated or embedded in short utterances
We computed the percentage of the time that each infant watched the visual stimuli during the familiarization phase (TLT-pct)
We found that the infants associated the words with the correct and the incorrect videos (mean total looking time (TLT) = 1464 ± 311 ms for the correct videos and 1596 ± 221 ms for the incorrect ones; t(19) = − 1.363, P = 0.189), and the mean TLT proportion (TLT-p), TLT-acc, longest fixation (LF)-p, LF-acc were not different to chance (t(19) = − 1.707, P = 0.104; t(19) = − 2.092, P = 0.057; t(19) = − 1.382, P = 0.183; and t(19) = − 1.406, P = 0.176, respectively) (Fig. 2f)
Summary
Before the 6-months of age, infants succeed to learn words associated with objects and actions when the words are presented isolated or embedded in short utterances. The author interpreted the results as an infants’ bias to process speech over visual stimuli at this age These negative results differ from others showing that infants learn new word-image associations when they take place in segmented instead of fluent contexts. After the exposure to a series of word-image associations presented isolated or embedded in short utterances, infants as young as 4-month-olds succeed in generalizing familiar nouns such as mommy and d addy[5] and feet and hands[6] to different visual referents, and familiar verbs such as “hit” to the corresponding gesture[7]. A recent study showed that vowel harmony is better than consonant harmony at leading continuous speech segmentation in 7-month-old[14]
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