Phonetic representation of frequent function words in 8-month-old infants

Abstract

Recent work by a number of researchers showed that even preverbal infants detect and recognize functors in continuous speech. In our research, English-learning infants aged 11 to 13 months, but not 8 months, recognized frequent and infrequent functors as a class, and represented them in segmental detail (Shi et al., 2003; Shi et al., 2004). Here we report a study on 8-month-old infants’ recognition and representation of high versus low frequency functors. Infants heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a high frequency functor ‘‘the,’’ versus a nonsense functor ‘‘kuh,’’ differing from ‘‘the’’ only in the initial consonant, with the prosody unchanged. Another group of 8-month-olds heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a low frequency functor ‘‘its,’’ versus a nonsense functor ‘‘ots.’’ Recognition of functors would be indicated by longer listening time to sequences containing real functors. Results reveal no differential listening time between ‘‘the+lexical word(LW)’’ and ‘‘kuh+LW,’’ nor between ‘‘its+LW’’ and ‘‘ots+LW;’’ however, ‘‘the+LW’’ and ‘‘kuh+LW’’ together induced longer listening time than ‘‘its+LW’’ and ‘‘ots+LW.’’ We conclude that 8-month olds recognize the frequent, familiar ‘‘the’’ in continuous speech, but it is underspecified phonetically in infants’ initial lexicon. Our previous work indicates detailed specification by 11 months.