What Paradox? Referential Cues Allow for Infant Use of Phonetic Detail in Word Learning

• Published in: Child development Vol. 81; no. 5; pp. 1376 - 1383
• Main Authors: Fennell, Christopher T., Waxman, Sandra R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-09-2010; Wiley-Blackwell
• Subjects: Auditory Perception; Babies; Biological and medical sciences; Child Development; Cues; Developmental psychology; Discontinuity; EMPIRICAL REPORTS; Evaluation Methods; Experimental Psychology; Experimentation; Experiments; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Habituation; Humans; Infant; Infants; Laboratories; Language Acquisition; Learning; Legal objections; Mapping; Newborn. Infant; Novel words; Novels; Paradoxes; Perceptual learning; Phonetics; Phrases; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Sensory perception; Speech; Speech analysis; Speech Perception; Task Analysis; Training; Word Recognition; Words; Human; Learning; Acquisition process; Word; Language; Reference; Language development; Phonetics; Infant; Cognition; Experimental study
• ISSN: 0009-3920; 1467-8624
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01479.x

Past research has uncovered a surprising paradox: Although 14-month-olds have exquisite phonetic discrimination skills (e.g., distinguishing [b] from [d]), they have difficulty using phonetic detail when mapping novel words to objects in laboratory tasks (confusing bin and din). While some have attributed infants' difficulty to immature word learning abilities, the hypothesis presented herein is that infants are powerful word learners and this apparent difficulty occurs only when the referential status of the novel word is unclear. Across 2 experiments, 14-month-old infants (N = 44) used phonetic detail to map novel words to objects when conditions were conducive to word-referent mapping (clear sentential contexts and word-referent training), thus revealing no fundamental discontinuity in its use from speech perception to word learning.