title: What infants know about the unsaid: Phonological categorization in the absence of auditory input.
abstract: Acquiring a lexicon constitutes an essential step in early language development. From an early age on, infants store words with well-specified phonological representations, and they can spontaneously activate these representations on the basis of visual information only (Mani & Plunkett, 2010a, 2011). To what extent can infants inspect and categorize phonological representations in the absence of auditory input? The present study focuses on words that infants comprehend but do not attempt to pronounce yet, and introduces a novel methodology based on anticipatory eye-movements. In two experiments, 21-month-old French-learning infants were silently presented with images of familiar objects whose labels they comprehended but did not pronounce yet. We tested whether they could activate the phonological representation of these labels and categorize them based on their length. Infants' performance exceeded chance when the target words were mono- and trisyllabic, but not when they were mono- and disyllabic. Thus, even in the absence of auditory input infants can activate the phonological representation of words they do not pronounce yet, and use this representation to perform a categorization based on word length, provided the length difference is substantial.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University/Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris, France.
authors.forename: Céline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ngon
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University/Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris, France; Maternité Port-Royal, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France. Electronic address: sharon.peperkamp@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Peperkamp
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D010700:Phonetics
keywords: Categorization; Inner speech; Language development; Lexical access; Output representations; Phonology