Infants can learn decontextualized words before their first birthday.
Can infants below age 1 year learn words in one context and understand them in another? To investigate this question, two groups of parents trained infants from age 9 months on 8 categories of common objects. A control group received no training. At 12 months, infants in the experimental groups, but not in the control group, showed comprehension of the words in a new context. It appears that infants under 1 year old can learn words in a decontextualized, as distinct from a context-bound, fashion. Perceptual variability within the to-be-learned categories, and the perceptual similarity between training sets and the novel test items, did not appear to affect this learning.
Schafer
Graham
G
School of Psychology, University of Reading, United Kingdom. g.w.schafer@reading.ac.uk
D000367:Age Factors; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D010290:Parents; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary