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Young Infants' Word Comprehension Given An Unfamiliar Talker or Altered Pronunciations.
Abstract
To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately interpret co-occurring talker
characteristics and speech sound content. This ability was tested in 6- to 14-months-olds
by measuring their looking to named food and body part images. In the new talker condition
(n = 90), pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the mispronunciation condition
(n = 98), infants' mothers "mispronounced" the words (e.g., nazz for nose). Six- to
7-month-olds fixated target images above chance across conditions, understanding novel
talkers, and mothers' phonologically deviant speech equally. Eleven- to 14-months-olds
also understood new talkers, but performed poorly with mispronounced speech, indicating
sensitivity to phonological deviation. Between these ages, performance was mixed.
These findings highlight the changing roles of acoustic and phonetic variability in
early word comprehension, as infants learn which variations alter meaning.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15799Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/cdev.12888Publication Info
Bergelson, Elika; & Swingley, Daniel (2017). Young Infants' Word Comprehension Given An Unfamiliar Talker or Altered Pronunciations.
Child Dev. 10.1111/cdev.12888. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15799.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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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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