Six-Month-Old Infants' Preference for Lexical Words

Previous work has shown that newborn infants categorically discriminate the fundamental syntactic category distinction between lexical and grammatical words. In this article, we show that by the age of 6 months, infants prefer to listen to lexical over grammatical words. In Experiment 1, infants wer...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological science 2001-01, Vol.12 (1), p.70-75
Main Authors: Shi, Rushen, Werker, Janet F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Auditory discrimination
Babies
Choice Behavior
Experimentation
Female
Function words
Habituation
Habituation, Psychophysiologic
Humans
Infant
Infant Behavior - psychology
Infant, Newborn
Infants
Language
Language acquisition
Male
Psychology
Speech
Syntactics
Syntax
Vocabulary
Wordplay
Words
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Previous work has shown that newborn infants categorically discriminate the fundamental syntactic category distinction between lexical and grammatical words. In this article, we show that by the age of 6 months, infants prefer to listen to lexical over grammatical words. In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to a list of either lexical or grammatical words, and then tested on new lists of words from the same and the contrasting categories. The infants showed recovery to lexical words after habituation to grammatical words but not vice versa. This asymmetry indicates a possible preference for lexical words. In Experiments 2 and 3, preference was assessed directly by presenting infants with alternating trials of lexical and grammatical words, in the central-fixation preference procedure. The infants looked significantly longer during lexical-word than grammatical-word trials. These results show that by 6 months, infants attend preferentially to lexical words. The implications of this emerging attentional preference for subsequent language acquisition are discussed.
ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1111/1467-9280.00312