Twelve-month-olds learn novel word-object pairings differing only in stress pattern.
Infants at 1 ; 2 demonstrate difficulty in accessing subtle phonetic information about newly learned word-object pairings (Stager & Werker, 1997). In this study, we examined whether or not infants can access subtle prosodic information such as lexical stress in a word learning task. We tested infants younger than 1 ; 2 to see if they could learn two new word-object associations that differ only in stress pattern (Sww versus wSw). Our results are the first to demonstrate that, even without contextual support, infants at 1 ; 0 succeed at this task, suggesting that the salient acoustic properties associated with lexical stress facilitate word-object associative learning.
Curtin
Suzanne
S
Department of Psychology, 2500 University Drive NW, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada. scurtin@ucalgary.ca
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001245:Association Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D014825:Vocabulary