Recognition of function words in 8‐month‐old French‐learning infants

Previous work has shown that German‐learning 7‐9‐month‐old infants recognize function words (Hoehle and Weissenborn, 2003). English‐learning infants recognize function words around 10.5‐11 months (Schafer et al. 1998; Shady, 1996; Shi et al., 2003, 2004), and the highly frequent determiner ‘‘the’’ at 8 months (Shi et al., 2004). The present study investigates French‐learning infants’ recognition of function words. As French is a syllable‐timing language, the fuller syllabic status may allow infants to recognize function words earlier than English‐learning infants. Syntactically and morphologically, functional elements occur more systematically in French than in English, providing reliable statistical cues to functor segmentation. Using a preferential looking procedure, we familiarized 8‐month‐olds with a target function word (‘‘des,’’ ‘‘la,’’ ‘‘mes’’ or ‘‘ta’’), and tested them with phrases containing the target versus a non‐target. Results showed that infants’ looking time to the phrases containing the t...