Phonotactic Constraints on Infant Word Learning

Overview

Journal Infancy

Specialties Gynecology & Obstetrics
Pediatrics

Date 2011 Feb 8

PMID 21297877

Citations 38

Authors

Katharine Graf Estes

Jan Edwards

Jenny R Saffran

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants' precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first years of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To address this question, 18-month-olds were presented with two phonotactically legal object labels (containing sound sequences that occur frequently in English) or two phonotactically illegal object labels (containing sound sequences that never occur in English), paired with novel objects. Infants were then tested using a looking-while-listening measure. The results revealed that infants looked at the correct objects after hearing the legal labels, but not the illegal labels. Furthermore, vocabulary size was related to performance. Infants with larger receptive vocabularies displayed greater differences between learning of legal and illegal labels than infants with smaller vocabularies. These findings provide evidence that infants' knowledge of native language sound patterns influences their word learning.

Citing Articles

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