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    At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns.

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    Date
    2012-02-28
    Author
    Bergelson, E
    Swingley, D
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    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 Article
    Subject
    Child Language
    Comprehension
    Female
    Humans
    Infant
    Intention
    Language Development
    Language Tests
    Male
    Pattern Recognition, Visual
    Psychology, Child
    Semantics
    Vocabulary
    Permalink
    http://hdl.handle.net/10161/12628
    Published Version (Please cite this version)
    10.1073/pnas.1113380109
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