Abstract:

At around 7.5 months, English-learning infants begin to show some ability to segment words from fluent speech. Moreover, there is evidence that infants at this age begin to engage in some long-term encoding and retention of information about the sound patterns of words that occur frequently in fluent speech. Infants' memory for these sound patterns apparently does not depend on their pairing with any concrete referents. Thus, at least in some instances, word learning may occur by first storing information about sound patterns, and then subsequently attaching a meaning to these. Additional findings from our laboratory suggest that these early representations of the sound patterns of words are rather detailed with respect to phonetic properties and may include information about such indexical properties as talker identity. [Work supported by NICHD and NIMH.]