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Updated: May 22, 2026
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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
12-month-olds' phonotactic knowledge guides their word-object mappings.
Heather MacKenzie1, Suzanne Curtin, Susan A Graham
1Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Child Development
|April 28, 2012
Summary
Twelve-month-old infants accept novel object labels that follow their native language's sound rules. They reject words violating phonotactics, showing early language-specific word learning.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infants develop language-specific sound perception early in life.
- Understanding how infants learn word forms is crucial for language acquisition research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if 12-month-olds accept novel object labels that differ phonologically from their native language.
- To determine if infants apply language-specific phonotactic constraints to word learning.
Main Methods:
- Sixty 12-month-old infants participated in an associative learning task.
- Infants were habituated to word-object pairings using English, Japanese, or Czech words.
- Word types varied in phonological structure (e.g., CVCV, CCVC).
Main Results:
- Infants successfully associated objects with CVCV English, CCVC English, and CVCV Japanese words.
- Infants did not associate objects with CCVC Czech words.
- This indicates infants' acceptance of word forms is constrained by native language phonotactics.
Conclusions:
- By 12 months, infants utilize language-specific knowledge to evaluate word forms.
- Infants reject novel words that violate the phonotactic rules of their native language.
- This finding highlights the early development of language-specific phonological processing in infants.
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