Semantic Specificity in One-Year-Olds’ Word Comprehension
Abstract
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. The present study investigated infants’ knowledge
about familiar nouns. Infants (n = 46, 12–20-month-olds) saw two-image displays of
familiar objects, or one familiar and one novel object. Infants heard either a matching
word (e.g. “foot’ when seeing foot and juice), a related word (e.g. “sock” when seeing
foot and juice) or a nonce word (e.g. “fep” when seeing a novel object and dog). Across
the whole sample, infants reliably fixated the referent on matching and nonce trials.
On the critical related trials we found increasingly less looking to the incorrect
(but related) image with age. These results suggest that one-year-olds look at familiar
objects both when they hear them labeled and when they hear related labels, to similar
degrees, but over the second year increasingly rely on semantic fit. We suggest that
infants’ initial semantic representations are imprecise, and continue to sharpen over
the second postnatal year.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15797Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1080/15475441.2017.1324308Publication Info
Bergelson, Elika; & Aslin, Richard (2017). Semantic Specificity in One-Year-Olds’ Word Comprehension. Language Learning and Development, 13(4). pp. 481-501. 10.1080/15475441.2017.1324308. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15797.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.
Collections
More Info
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

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info