The emergence of word representation independent of context

Abstract

Eleven-month-old French-learning infants prefer to listen to familiar over unfamiliar words (presented auditorily and independent of context), suggesting that there is a stable (although not necessarily complete) internal representation of word forms by this age [P. A. Halle and B. de Boysson-Bardies, IBAD 17, 463–481 (1994)]. The current study explored word representation by infants learning British English. Infants at 9 and 11 months of age were tested using the headturn preference paradigm as modified by Halle and Boysson-Bardies. Phonetically and phonotactically similar lists of familiar and unfamiliar disyllabic words and phrases were developed and matched for F0, amplitude and duration. The lists contained iambic and trochaic patterns in proportions typical for English. While initial results (based on looking times) suggest that the 11-month-old British infants, like the French, preferred the familiar over the unfamiliar list, 9-month-old infants showed no significant preference for either list. The individual infant results suggest that stable representation of word forms begins to emerge at 11 months, mirroring other cognitive advances at this time (e.g., object permanence, problem solving, language specific phonetic attunement). [Work supported by the ESRC.]