At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns
- 13 February 2012
- journal article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 109 (9), 3253-3258
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113380109
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.Keywords
This publication has 37 references indexed in Scilit:
- Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infantsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- Contributions of infant word learning to language developmentPhilosophical Transactions B, 2009
- Learning words’ sounds before learning how words sound: 9-Month-olds use distinct objects as cues to categorize speech informationCognition, 2009
- Early word-learning entails reference, not merely associationsTrends in Cognitive Sciences, 2009
- Categorizing words using ‘frequent frames’: what cross‐linguistic analyses reveal about distributional acquisition strategiesDevelopmental Science, 2009
- Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statisticsCognition, 2008
- Innate Ideas Revisited: For a Principle of Persistence in Infants' Physical ReasoningPerspectives on Psychological Science, 2008
- Could we please lose the mapping metaphor, please?Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2001
- Developmental changes in perception of nonnative vowel contrasts.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1994
- Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of lifeInfant Behavior and Development, 1984