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At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns.
Abstract
It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning
words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations
of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their
sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a
capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that
this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed:
in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of
6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while
their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed
their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words.
Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young
infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising
accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can
already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words
before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a
perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken
language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Child LanguageComprehension
Female
Humans
Infant
Intention
Language Development
Language Tests
Male
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Psychology, Child
Semantics
Vocabulary
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12628Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1073/pnas.1113380109Publication Info
Bergelson, Elika; & Swingley, Daniel (2012). At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 109(9). pp. 3253-3258. 10.1073/pnas.1113380109. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12628.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
Associate Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
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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