Early Word Comprehension in Infants: Replication and Extension.
Abstract
A handful of recent experimental reports have shown that infants of 6 to 9 months
know the meanings of some common words. Here, we replicate and extend these findings.
With a new set of items, we show that when young infants (age 6-16 months, n=49) are
presented with side-by-side video clips depicting various common early words, and
one clip is named in a sentence, they look at the named video at above-chance rates.
We demonstrate anew that infants understand common words by 6-9 months, and that performance
increases substantially around 14 months. The results imply that 6-9 month olds' failure
to understand words not referring to objects (verbs, adjectives, performatives) in
a similar prior study is not attributable to the use of dynamic video depictions.
Thus, 6-9 month olds' experience of spoken language includes some understanding of
common words for concrete objects, but relatively impoverished comprehension of other
words.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12627Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1080/15475441.2014.979387Publication Info
Bergelson, Elika; & Swingley, Daniel (n.d.). Early Word Comprehension in Infants: Replication and Extension. Lang Learn Dev, 11(4). pp. 369-380. 10.1080/15475441.2014.979387. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12627.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Elika Bergelson
Crandall Family Assistant Professor
Dr. Bergelson accepts PhD applicants through the Developmental and Cog/CogNeuro areas
of P&N and the CNAP program.In my research, I try to understand the interplay of processes
during language acquisition. In particular, I am interested in how word learning relates
to other aspects of learning language (e.g. speech sound acquisition, grammar/morphology
learning), and social/cognitive development more broadly (e.g. joint attention processes)
in the first few

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