The flexibility of 12-month-olds' preferences for phonologically appropriate object labels
Date
2014-02
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Publisher
American Psychological Association
Abstract
We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound-object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets of Czech words with onsets that are illegal in English (e.g., ptak), consonantal sounds (e.g., /l/), or novel function-like words (e.g., iv). When infants were provided with a training phase that highlighted the purpose of the task, they associated the phonotactically illegal Czech words, but not the consonantal sounds or novel function-like words, with objects. Thus, English-learning 12-month-old infants' flexibility in associating various sound forms with novel objects is limited to labels that share the structural shape of well-formed noun-like words.
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Citation
MacKenzie, H. K., Graham, S. A., Curtin, S., & Archer, S. L. (2014). The flexibility of 12-month-olds' preferences for phonologically appropriate object labels. "Developmental Psychology". 2014: 50(2), pp. 422-430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033524