Rapid recognition at 10 months as a predictor of language development.

Infants' ability to recognize words in continuous speech is vital for building a vocabulary. We here examined the amount and type of exposure needed for 10-month-olds to recognize words. Infants first heard a word, either embedded within an utterance or in isolation, then recognition was assessed by comparing event-related potentials to this word versus a word that they had not heard directly before. Although all 10-month-olds showed recognition responses to words first heard in isolation, not all infants showed such responses to words they had first heard within an utterance. Those that did succeed in the latter, harder, task, however, understood more words and utterances when re-tested at 12 months, and understood more words and produced more words at 24 months, compared with those who had shown no such recognition response at 10 months. The ability to rapidly recognize the words in continuous utterances is clearly linked to future language development.

[1]  James L. Morgan,et al.  Prosody and the Roots of Parsing , 1996 .

[2]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Electrophysiological evidence for prelinguistic infants' word recognition in continuous speech. , 2005, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[3]  M. Rugg.  The effects of semantic priming and work repetition on event-related potentials. , 1985, Psychophysiology.

[4]  Mary R. Newsome,et al.  The Beginnings of Word Segmentation in English-Learning Infants , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  Angela D. Friederici,et al.  Phonotactic Knowledge and Lexical-Semantic Processing in One-year-olds: Brain Responses to Words and Nonsense Words in Picture Contexts , 2005, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[6]  Elissa L. Newport,et al.  Segmenting nonsense: an event-related potential index of perceived onsets in continuous speech , 2002, Nature Neuroscience.

[7]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Prosodic Structure in Early Word Segmentation: ERP Evidence From Dutch Ten-Month-Olds. , 2009, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[8]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words and voices. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[9]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[10]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants′ Detection of the Sound Patterns of Words in Fluent Speech , 1995, Cognitive Psychology.

[11]  Kazuo Okanoya,et al.  On-line Assessment of Statistical Learning by Event-related Potentials , 2008, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[12]  D. Mills,et al.  Two languages, one developing brain: event-related potentials to words in bilingual toddlers. , 2006, Developmental science.

[13]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  On Relational Meaning: The Acquisition of Verb Meaning. Technical Report No. 78. , 1977 .

[14]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary , 1987 .

[15]  A. Friederici,et al.  Phonotactic knowledge of word boundaries and its use in infant speech perception , 1993, Perception & psychophysics.

[16]  A. Rodríguez-Fornells,et al.  The effects of stress and statistical cues on continuous speech segmentation: An event-related brain potential study , 2006, Brain Research.

[17]  P. Hagoort,et al.  Neurophysiological evidence of delayed segmentation in a foreign language , 2007, Brain Research.

[18]  Charles Yang,et al.  Mechanisms and Constraints in Word Segmentation , 2005 .

[19]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis. , 2006, Developmental psychology.

[20]  Helen J. Neville,et al.  Language comprehension and cerebral specialization from 13 to 20 months , 1997 .

[21]  K. Plunkett,et al.  Watching the Infant Brain Learn Words: Effects of Vocabulary Size and Experience. , 2005 .

[22]  Rushen Shi,et al.  The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants. , 2008, Developmental science.

[23]  R. Baayen,et al.  Prefix stripping re-revisited , 1994 .

[24]  A. Fernald.  Four-Month-Old Infants Prefer to Listen to Motherese" , 1985 .

[25]  M. Brent,et al.  The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development , 2001, Cognition.

[26]  P. Kuhl.  Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code , 2004, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[27]  J. Morgan,et al.  Mommy and Me , 2005, Psychological science.

[28]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Phonotactic and Prosodic Effects on Word Segmentation in Infants , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[29]  Joost Van de Weijer,et al.  Language input for word discovery , 1999 .

[30]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' memory for spoken words. , 1997, Science.

[31]  Thierry Nazzi,et al.  Words and syllables in fluent speech segmentation by French-learning infants: An ERP study , 2010, Brain Research.

[32]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Brain potentials for word segmentation at seven months predict later language development , 2010 .