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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
Authors
Bergelson, Elika
Swingley, Daniel
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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
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12628
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1073/pnas.1113380109
Publication 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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Scholars@Duke

Bergelson

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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