The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development

Fluent speech contains no known acoustic analog of the blank spaces between printed words. Early research presumed that word learning is driven primarily by exposure to isolated words. In the last decade there has been a shift to the view that exposure to isolated words is unreliable and plays littl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2001-09, Vol.81 (2), p.B33-B44
Main Authors: Brent, Michael R, Siskind, Jeffrey Mark
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological and medical sciences
Caregiver Speech
Child Development
Child Language
Child-directed speech
Cognition
Developmental psychology
Experience
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Infant
Infant-directed speech
Infants
Isolated words
Isolation Effect
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Learning
Male
Mothers
Newborn. Infant
Parent Child Relationship
Parent-Child Relations
Predictor Variables
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Segmentation (Verbal)
Semantics
Speech
Speech segmentation
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Development
Word Learning
Words
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Summary:Fluent speech contains no known acoustic analog of the blank spaces between printed words. Early research presumed that word learning is driven primarily by exposure to isolated words. In the last decade there has been a shift to the view that exposure to isolated words is unreliable and plays little if any role in early word learning. This study revisits the role of isolated words. The results show (a) that isolated words are a reliable feature of speech to infants, (b) that they include a variety of word types, many of which are repeated in close temporal proximity, (c) that a substantial fraction of the words infants produce are words that mothers speak in isolation, and (d) that the frequency with which a child hears a word in isolation predicts whether that word will be learned better than the child's total frequency of exposure to that word. Thus, exposure to isolated words may significantly facilitate vocabulary development at its earliest stages.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00122-6