Infants' memory for spoken words.
Infants' long-term retention of the sound patterns of words was explored by exposing them to recordings of three children's stories for 10 days during a 2-week period when they were 8 months old. After an interval of 2 weeks, the infants heard lists of words that either occurred frequently or did not occur in the stories. The infants listened significantly longer to the lists of story words. By comparison, a control group of infants who had not been exposed to the stories showed no such preference. The findings suggest that 8-month-olds are beginning to engage in long-term storage of words that occur frequently in speech, which is an important prerequisite for learning language.
Jusczyk
P W
PW
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Hohne
E A
EA
D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008568:Memory; D014825:Vocabulary