Infants Can Learn Decontextualized Words Before Their First Birthday

Schafer, G. (2005) Infants Can Learn Decontextualized Words Before Their First Birthday. Child Development, 76 (1). pp. 87-96. ISSN 0009-3920 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00831.x

Abstract/Summary

Can infants below age 1 year learn words in one context and understand them in another? To investigate this question, two groups of parents trained infants from age 9 months on 8 categories of common objects. A control group received no training. At 12 months, infants in the experimental groups, but not in the control group, showed comprehension of the words in a new context. It appears that infants under 1 year old can learn words in a decontextualized, as distinct from a context-bound, fashion. Perceptual variability within the to-be-learned categories, and the perceptual similarity between training sets and the novel test items, did not appear to affect this learning.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/2071
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Development Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Uncontrolled Keywords	early lexical development; early language; communicative development; comprehension; categorization; input; acquisition; speech
Publisher	Blackwell Publishers
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