Online word learning in 6-month-old infants
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1
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
Word learning includes the acquisition of word forms, the extraction of word meanings, and the mapping between word form and word meaning representations. Infants are able to establish such mappings well before their first birthday. As reflected in the infants’ behaviour, this initial word learning appears to be a slow and time consuming process. In contrast, some weeks after their first birthday, infants are able to quickly map a novel word onto a novel object. The present ERP study was conducted to find out, whether even younger infants are able to learn arbitrary mappings between objects and words on the basis of only a few presentations. Six-month-old infants were repeatedly presented with picture-word pairs of 16 unknown objects and 16 unknown words. Each half of the stimuli was presented either in a constant pairing condition, in which the mapping of a picture and a word can be learned, or in a rotated pairing condition, in which the mapping cannot be learned. In both conditions, each stimulus was presented eight times. A frontal positivity to initially unknown words decreased from earlier to later presentations. This effect reflects increasing familiarity with word forms, and it indicates the constitution of perceptual memory representations for words. During later presentations, picture-word priming effects known from previous infant studies were observed. These neurophysiological correlates of lexical-semantic memory indicate that infants have acquired (temporary) associative mappings between pictures and words. Thus, even at 6 months of age, infants are able to learn arbitrary associations between words and objects after only very few presentations.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Language
Citation:
Friedrich
M and
Friederici
A
(2008). Online word learning in 6-month-old infants.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.248
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Received:
09 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Manuela Friedrich, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, friedri@cbs.mpg.de