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Published on: April 19, 2017
Six-month-old infants' preference for lexical words
1School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. shi@audiospeech.ubc.ca
Psychological Science
|April 11, 2001
Summary
Six-month-old infants show a preference for listening to lexical words over grammatical words. This early attentional bias may influence later language development.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Newborn infants can distinguish between lexical (e.g., nouns, verbs) and grammatical (e.g., 'the', 'of') words.
- Understanding word categories is a foundational aspect of language acquisition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether 6-month-old infants exhibit a listening preference for lexical over grammatical words.
- To explore the developmental trajectory of word category discrimination in infancy.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1 used a habituation procedure, familiarizing infants with either lexical or grammatical words.
- Experiments 2 and 3 employed a central-fixation preference procedure to directly measure looking time towards word types.
- Infants' responses (recovery of attention, looking duration) were recorded.
Main Results:
- Infants showed a significant recovery of attention to lexical words after habituation to grammatical words, but not vice versa.
- Infants looked significantly longer at lexical words compared to grammatical words in direct preference tests.
- A clear attentional preference for lexical words emerged by 6 months of age.
Conclusions:
- By 6 months, infants preferentially attend to lexical words over grammatical words.
- This emerging preference for lexical words may play a crucial role in early language acquisition.
- Findings suggest an innate bias that guides infants' focus towards content-rich words.
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