Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds.
Published
Journal Article
Recent research reported the surprising finding that even 6-mo-olds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:3253-3258]. However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like older learners? We test 6-mo-olds for a hallmark of the mature lexicon: cross-word relations. We also examine whether properties of the home environment that have been linked with lexical knowledge in older children are detectable in the initial stage of comprehension. We use a new dataset, which includes in-lab comprehension and home measures from the same infants. We find evidence for cross-word structure: On seeing two images of common nouns, infants looked significantly more at named target images when the competitor images were semantically unrelated (e.g., milk and foot) than when they were related (e.g., milk and juice), just as older learners do. We further find initial evidence for home-lab links: common noun "copresence" (i.e., whether words' referents were present and attended to in home recordings) correlated with in-lab comprehension. These findings suggest that, even in neophyte word learners, cross-word relations are formed early and the home learning environment measurably helps shape the lexicon from the outset.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Bergelson, E; Aslin, RN
Published Date
- December 2017
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 114 / 49
Start / End Page
- 12916 - 12921
PubMed ID
- 29158399
Pubmed Central ID
- 29158399
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1091-6490
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0027-8424
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1073/pnas.1712966114
Language
- eng