title: Early word recognition and later language skills.
abstract: Recent behavioral and electrophysiological evidence has highlighted the long-term importance for language skills of an early ability to recognize words in continuous speech. We here present further tests of this long-term link in the form of follow-up studies conducted with two (separate) groups of infants who had earlier participated in speech segmentation tasks. Each study extends prior follow-up tests: Study 1 by using a novel follow-up measure that taps into online processing, Study 2 by assessing language performance relationships over a longer time span than previously tested. Results of Study 1 show that brain correlates of speech segmentation ability at 10 months are positively related to 16-month-olds' target fixations in a looking-while-listening task. Results of Study 2 show that infant speech segmentation ability no longer directly predicts language profiles at the age of five. However, a meta-analysis across our results and those of similar studies (Study 3) reveals that age at follow-up does not moderate effect size. Together, the results suggest that infants' ability to recognize words in speech certainly benefits early vocabulary development; further observed relationships of later language skills to early word recognition may be consequent upon this vocabulary size effect.
authors.affiliation: Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. c.m.m.junge@uu.nl.
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Junge
authors.affiliation: MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia. A.Cutler@uws.edu.au.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cutler