Sensitivity to Word‐Final Phonotactics in 9‐ to 16‐Month‐Old Infants

Previous research has shown that infants begin to display sensitivities to language‐specific phonotactics and probabilistic phonotactics at around 9 months of age. However, certain phonotactic patterns have not yet been examined, such as contrast neutralization, in which phonemic contrasts are neutralized typically in syllable‐ or word‐final position. Thus, the acquisition of contrast neutralization is dependent on infants' ability to perceive certain contrasts in final position. The studies reported here test infants' sensitivity to voicing neutralization in word‐final position and infants' discrimination of voicing and place of articulation (POA) contrasts in word‐initial and word‐final position. Nine and 11‐month‐old Dutch‐learning infants showed no preference for legal versus illegal voicing phonotactics that were contrasted in word‐final position. Furthermore, 10‐month‐old infants showed no discrimination of voicing or POA contrasts in word‐final position, whereas they did show sensitivity to the same contrasts in word‐initial position. By 16 months, infants were able to discriminate POA contrasts in word‐final position, although showing no discrimination of the word‐final voicing contrast. These findings have broad implications for models of how learners acquire the phonological structures of their language, for the types of phonotactic structures to which infants are presumed to be sensitive, and for the relative sensitivity to phonemic distinctions by syllable and word position during acquisition.     

Fast Mapping but Poor Retention by 24‐Month‐Old Infants

Four experiments explored the processes that bridge between referent selection and word learning. Twenty‐four‐month‐old infants were presented with several novel names during a referent selection task that included both familiar and novel objects and tested for retention after a 5‐min delay. The 5‐min delay ensured that word learning was based on retrieval from long‐term memory. Moreover, the relative familiarity of objects used during the retention test was explicitly controlled. Across experiments, infants were excellent at referent selection, but very poor at retention. Although the highly controlled retention test was clearly challenging, infants were able to demonstrate retention of the first 4 novel names presented in the session when referent selection was augmented with ostensive naming. These results suggest that fast mapping is robust for reference selection but might be more transient than previously reported for lexical retention. The relations between reference selection and retention are discussed in terms of competitive processes on 2 timescales: competition among objects on individual referent selection trials and competition among multiple novel name–object mappings made across an experimental session.     

Jealousy in 6‐Month‐Old Infants

Thirty‐two 6‐month‐old infants were exposed to their mothers attending, in turn, to a lifelike baby doll and a book. Infant negativity was greater when maternal attention was directed toward the social object, suggesting the presence of an early form of jealousy by 6 months of age.     

Attention to Maternal Multimodal Naming by 6‐ to 8‐Month‐Old Infants and Learning of Word–Object Relations

We examined whether mothers' use of temporal synchrony between spoken words and moving objects, and infants' attention to object naming, predict infants' learning of word–object relations. Following 5 min of free play, 24 mothers taught their 6‐ to 8‐month‐olds the names of 2 toy objects, Gow and Chi, during a 3‐min play episode. Infants were then tested for their word mapping. The videotaped episodes were coded for mothers' object naming and infants' attention to different naming types. Results indicated that mothers' use of temporal synchrony and infants' attention during play covaried with infants' word‐mapping ability. Specifically, infants who switched eye gaze from mother to object most frequently during naming learned the word–object relations. The findings suggest that maternal naming and infants' word‐mapping abilities are bidirectionally related. Variability in infants' attention to maternal multimodal naming explains the variability in early lexical‐mapping development.     

Can 18‐Month‐Old Infants Learn Words by Listening In on Conversations?

Previous research has shown that children as young as 2 can learn words from 3rd‐party conversations (Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001). The focus of this study was to determine whether younger infants could learn a new word through overhearing. Novel object labels were introduced to 18‐month‐old infants in 1 of 2 conditions: directly by an experimenter or in the context of overhearing the experimenter use the word while interacting with another adult. The findings suggest that, when memory demands are not too high, 18‐month‐old infants can learn words through overhearing.     

Clause Segmentation by 6‐Month‐Old Infants: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language‐specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well‐formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning the grammatical structure of their language. Despite the potentially important role that the perception of large prosodic units may play in early language acquisition, there has been little work investigating the extraction of these units from fluent speech by infants learning languages other than English. We report 2 experiments investigating Dutch learners' clause segmentation abilities. In these studies, Dutch‐learning 6‐month‐olds readily extract clauses from speech. However, Dutch learners differ from English learners in that they seem to be more reliant on pauses to detect clause boundaries. Two closely related explanations for this finding are considered, both of which stem from the acoustic differences in clause boundary realizations in Dutch versus English.     

Hierarchical Processing in Seven‐Month‐Old Infants

Hierarchical structures are crucial to many aspects of cognitive processing and especially for language. However, there still is little experimental support for the ability of infants to learn such structures. Here, we show that, with structures simple enough to be processed by various animals, seven‐month‐old infants seem to learn hierarchical relations. Infants were presented with an artificial language composed of “sentences” made of three‐syllable “words.” The syllables within words conformed to repetition patterns based on syllable tokens involving either adjacent repetitions (e.g., dubaba) or nonadjacent repetitions (e.g., du ba du ) . Importantly, the sequence of word structures in each sentence conformed to repetition patterns based on word types (e.g., aba‐ abb ‐ abb ). Infants learned this repetition pattern of repetition patterns and thus likely a hierarchical pattern based on repetitions, but only when the repeated word structure was based on adjacent repetitions. While our results leave open the question of which exact sentence‐level pattern infants learned, they suggest that infants embedded the word‐level patterns into a higher‐level pattern and thus seemed to acquire a hierarchically embedded pattern.     

12‐Month‐Old Infants Represent Probable Endings of Motion Events

This experiment investigated 12‐month‐old infants' ability to link an event's beginning to its probable ending. Following Csibra, Biro, Koos, and Gergely (2003), infants were habituated to a simple chasing event involving animated balls, and at test saw 2 possible endings: either 1 ball caught the other or failed to do so. Two controls were added to the previous work. First, the total amount of motion was controlled in the test endings; second, the endings were paired with a nonchasing beginning to ensure that behavior at test reflected representation of the event beginning itself. The results replicated Csibra et al.'s finding that infants look longer at the noncatching ending following the chasing beginning; moreover, infants showed no preference for either ending following the no‐chasing beginning. This study supports the claim that infants can calculate the rational ending of a goal‐directed motion event.     

Form Perception of Partly Occluded Shapes in 4‐Month‐Old Infants

Two habituation experiments were conducted to investigate how 4‐month‐old infants perceive partly occluded shapes. In the first experiment, we presented a simple, partly occluded shape to the infants until habituation was reached. Then we showed either a probable completion (one that would be predicted on the basis of both local and global cues) or an improbable completion. Longer looking times were found for the improbably completed shape (compared to probable and control conditions), suggesting that the probable shape was perceived during partial occlusion. In the second experiment, infants were habituated to more ambiguous partly occluded shapes, where local and global cues would result in different completions. For adults, the percept of these shapes is usually dominated by global influences. However, after habituation the infants looked longer at the globally completed shapes. These results suggest that by the age of 4 months, infants are able to infer the perceptual completion of partly occluded shapes, but for more ambiguous shapes, this completion seems to be dominated by local influences.     

Word Level Stress and Lexical Processing in 17‐Month‐Old Infants

Detailed representations enable infants to distinguish words from one another and more easily recognize new words. We examined whether 17‐month‐old infants encode word stress in their familiar word representations. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with pairs of familiar objects while hearing a target label either properly pronounced with the correct stress (e.g., baby /’be?bi/) or mis‐pronounced with the incorrect stress pattern (e.g., baby /be?’bi/). Infants mapped both the correctly stressed and mis‐stressed labels to the target objects; however, they were slower to fixate the target when hearing the mis‐stressed label. In Experiment 2, we examined whether infants appreciate that stress has a nonproductive role in English (i.e., altering the stress of a word does not typically signal a change in word meaning) by presenting infants with a familiar object paired with a novel object while hearing either correctly stressed or mis‐stressed familiar words (Experiment 2). Here, infants mapped the correctly stressed label to the familiar object but did not map the mis‐stressed label reliably to either the target or distractor objects. These findings suggest that word stress impacts the processing of familiar words, and infants have burgeoning knowledge that altering the stress pattern of a familiar word does not reliably signal a new referent.     

Typical and Atypical Development of Visual Attention in 3‐ to 9‐Month‐Old Infants

The interactions between attention and stimulus encoding in infancy were examined using heart rate (HR) and visual habituation measures. At 3, 6, and 9 months of age, infants (N = 119) were habituated to an adult face; longest look (LL) duration was measured as an indicator of encoding speed. Three groups were formed based on LL change from 3 to 9 months: Large Decrease, Small Decrease, and Increase. Using concurrent electrocardiograph recordings, attention was measured through the percentage of looking time in orienting, sustained attention, and attention termination. We partially replicated previous findings regarding developmental patterns of attention in these three groups, notably that these patterns were different for the Increase group. Looks away from the stimulus were also assessed in each attentional phase and, as predicted, HR acceleration phases showed less visual engagement than HR deceleration phases. We also found anomalous behavior for the LL Increase group. In general, this small but distinct group showed similarities at 3 months to the presumably more mature behavior of typical 9 month olds, but by 9 months, they behaved more like typical 3 month olds regarding some, but not all, cognitive measures. These results are discussed in the context of the development of endogenous attention.     

Evidence of the Face Inversion Effect in 4‐Month‐Old Infants

This study tested the presence of the face inversion effect in 4‐month‐old infants using habituation to criterion followed by a novelty preference paradigm. Results of Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings, showing that when 1 single photograph of a face is presented in the habituation phase and when infants are required to recognize the same photograph, no differences in recognition performance with upright and inverted faces are found. However, Experiment 2 showed that, when infants are habituated to a face shown in a variety of poses and are required to recognize a new pose of the same face, infants' recognition performances were higher for upright than for inverted faces. Overall, results indicate that, under some experimental conditions, 4‐month‐olds process faces differently according to whether faces are presented upright or inverted.     

The Development of Rational Imitation in 9‐ and 12‐Month‐Old Infants

Studies on rational imitation have provided evidence for the fact that infants as young as 12 months of age engage in rational imitation. However, the developmental onset of this ability is unclear. In this study, we investigated whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds detect voluntary and implicit as well as nonvoluntary and explicit constraints in the head touch task. Three groups of infants watched video sequences, which displayed a person illuminating a lamp using the head. The hands of the model were either free, occupied by voluntarily holding a blanket, or nonvoluntarily restrained by being tied to the table. An additional control group of infants watched the model turning on the lamp by using the hand. Given that the majority of infants imitated the head touch when the model's hands were free, there was evidence for rational imitation in comparison to the condition in which the model's hands were tied to the table, but not in comparison to the condition in which the hands were occupied by holding a blanket. Nine‐month‐olds showed no differences in their behavior according to the condition. These findings clarify the onset of rational imitation by showing that 12‐month‐olds (but not 9‐month‐olds) take into account a situational constraint only when the constraint is nonvoluntary and explicit.     

Perception of Multisensory Gender Coherence in 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants

One of the most salient social categories conveyed by human faces and voices is gender. We investigated the developmental emergence of the ability to perceive the coherence of auditory and visual attributes of gender in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Infants viewed two side‐by‐side video clips of a man and a woman singing a nursery rhyme and heard a synchronous male or female sound track. Results showed that 6‐month‐old infants did not match the audible and visible attributes of gender, and 9‐month‐old infants matched only female faces and voices. These findings indicate that the ability to perceive the multisensory coherence of gender emerges relatively late in infancy and that it reflects the greater experience that most infants have with female faces and voices.     

Infants' Evolving Representations of Object Motion During Occlusion: A Longitudinal Study of 6‐ to 12‐Month‐Old Infants

Infants' ability to track temporarily occluded objects that moved on circular trajectories was investigated in 20 infants using a longitudinal design. They were first seen at 6 months and then every 2nd month until the end of their 1st year. Infants were presented with occlusion events covering 20% of the target's trajectory (effective occlusion interval ranged from 500–4,000 msec). Gaze was measured using an ASL 504 infrared eye‐tracking system. Results effectively demonstrate that infants from 6 months of age can represent the spatiotemporal dynamics of occluded objects. Infants at all ages tested were able to predict, under certain conditions, when and where the object would reappear after occlusion. They moved gaze accurately to the position where the object was going to reappear and scaled their timing to the current occlusion duration. The average rate of predictive gaze crossings increased with occlusion duration. These results are discussed as a 2‐factor process. Successful predictions are dependent on strong representations, themselves dependent on the richness of information available during encoding and graded representations.     

Phonological Specificity in 12‐ and 17‐Month‐Old French‐Speaking Infants

The literature reports some contradictory results on the degree of phonological specificity of infants’ early lexical representations in the Romance language, French, and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether these discrepancies are because of differences in method, in language characteristics, or in participants’ age. In this study, we examined whether 12‐ and 17‐month‐old French‐speaking infants are able to distinguish well‐pronounced from mispronounced words (one or two features of their initial consonant). To this end, 46 infants participated in a preferential looking experiment in which they were presented with pairs of pictures together with a spoken word well pronounced or mispronounced. The results show that both 12‐ and 17‐month‐old infants look longer at the pictures corresponding to well‐pronounced words than to mispronounced words, but show no difference between the two mispronunciation types. These results suggest that, as early as 12 months, French‐speaking infants, like those exposed to Germanic languages, already possess detailed phonological representations of familiar words.     

Temporal Sequence of Global‐Local Processing in 3‐Month‐Old Infants

In 3 experiments, the temporal processing sequence of local and global visual properties was investigated with 3‐month‐old infants. Across the experiments, a global pattern was discriminated under conditions of less familiarization than was necessary for local elements to be discriminated, thus indicating a global precedence in the sequence of visual processing at 3 months of age. Patterns of discrimination were also observed to vary as a function of individual differences in infants' look duration. Furthermore, the pattern of novelty and familiarity preferences for short‐looking infants varied in complex ways as a function of familiarization time: Preferences for novel global properties were supplanted by familiarity preferences at the point in familiarization at which infants first became sensitive to local properties.     

Cross‐Race Preferences for Same‐Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3‐Month‐Old Infants

A visual preference procedure was used to examine preferences among faces of different ethnicities (African, Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern) in Chinese 3‐month‐old infants exposed only to Chinese faces. The infants demonstrated a preference for faces from their own ethnic group. Alongside previous results showing that Caucasian infants exposed only to Caucasian faces prefer same‐race faces (Kelly et al., 2005) and that Caucasian and African infants exposed only to native faces prefer the same over the other‐race faces (Bar‐Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006), the findings reported here (a) extend the same‐race preference observed in young infants to a new race of infants (Chinese), and (b) show that cross‐race preferences for same‐race faces extend beyond the perceptually robust contrast between African and Caucasian faces.     

Looking Behavior at Test and Relational Memory in 6‐Month‐Old Infants

Small‐scale eye‐tracking research lends support to behavioral studies of relational memory by 6 months of life. Here, in the largest eye‐tracking test of relational memory to date (n = 276), we replicate these findings and examine the impact of excluding data based on looking behavior characteristics at test. Past work examining infants' preferential looking toward arbitrary‐paired objects and scenes has excluded infants from analysis based upon “insufficient looking” at test. Yet, research suggests that variation in looking behavior may be associated with looking patterns during encoding, as well as trait‐like differences in visual and cognitive processing. Similar to past research, we observed evidence for relational memory among 6‐month‐olds. In keeping with past research, when infants were excluded based on “insufficient looking,” we observed evidence for relational memory only when infants were tested immediately. However, when exclusion criteria were relaxed, infants specifically demonstrated preferential looking during a presumably more difficult delay‐plus‐interference condition. Moreover, analyses revealed that looking behavior during encoding was associated with looking behavior at test. Together, results suggest that infants do possess rudimentary relational memory capabilities, but that experimenters' ability to detect these capabilities is influenced by both experimental conditions and individual differences in looking behavior.     

From Syllables to Syntax: Multilevel Statistical Learning by 12‐Month‐Old Infants

To successfully acquire language, infants must be able to track multiple levels of regularities in the input. In many cases, regularities only emerge after some learning has already occurred. For example, the grammatical relationships between words are only evident once the words have been segmented from continuous speech. To ask whether infants can engage in this type of learning process, 12‐month‐old infants in 2 experiments were familiarized with multiword utterances synthesized as continuous speech. The words in the utterances were ordered based on a simple finite‐state grammar. Following exposure, infants were tested on novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The results indicate that the infants were able to perform 2 statistical learning tasks in sequence: first segmenting the words from continuous speech, and subsequently discovering the permissible orderings of the words. Given a single set of input, infants were able to acquire multiple levels of structure, suggesting that multiple levels of representation (initially syllable‐level combinations, subsequently word‐level combinations) can emerge during the course of learning.