Two-month-old infants' sensitivity to changes in arbitrary syllable-object pairings: the role of temporal synchrony

To explore early lexical development, the authors examined infants' sensitivity to changes in spoken syllables and objects given different temporal relations between syllable-object pairings. In Experiment 1, they habituated 2-month-olds to 1 syllable, /tah/ or /gah/, paired with an object in synchronous (utterances coincident with object motions, N = 16) or asynchronous (utterances erratic relative to object motions, N = 16) conditions. In the asynchronous condition, the audio track preceded or succeeded the visual track by 1,200 ms. On test, infants in the synchronous condition alone detected the changes. Post hoc computational analyses confirmed lower time separation, interpreted as greater synchrony, between peaks and onsets-offsets of visual motion and audio energy in the synchronous relative to the asynchronous condition. Further examining lexical development, in Experiment 2 they habituated 2-month-olds (N = 16) to two synchronous syllable-object pairs and tested them on switch versus same pairings. Infants failed to detect the switch in the pairings. These results suggest that 2-month-olds use synchrony to detect changes in one novel syllable-object pairing at a time, providing a basis for further word mapping development.