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Published on: April 28, 2016
Phonological representation in English-learning infants' word comprehension
Caroline Beech1, Daniel Swingley2
1Department of Psychology, Princeton University.
Developmental Psychology
|July 23, 2026
Summary
Infants as young as 9 months can detect mispronunciations, indicating they form accurate phonological representations of words early in development. This research sheds light on early language acquisition and word recognition in infants.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infants develop word comprehension within their first year.
- Limited research exists on the accuracy of infants' phonological representations during word comprehension at this early age.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how accurately infants aged 6-14 months represent phonological forms of words during comprehension.
- To determine the age at which infants begin to detect mispronunciations.
Main Methods:
- An internet-based language-guided-looking task was used to test English-learning infants (n=97) aged 6-8, 9-11, and 12-14 months.
- The task involved presenting infants with correct pronunciations and initial-consonant mispronunciations of words.
- Infant looking times towards target stimuli were recorded to measure recognition.
Main Results:
- Twelve- to 14-month-old infants consistently fixated targets less when hearing mispronunciations (odds ratio = 1.59).
- Nine- to 11-month-old infants showed reduced target fixation for mispronunciations, particularly for items with balanced salience (odds ratio = 1.51).
- The 6-8 month olds' performance was not detailed in the abstract, but older infants demonstrated sensitivity to phonological accuracy.
Conclusions:
- Findings suggest that infants' early word representations are not overly vague.
- Phonologically accurate encoding of at least some words occurs before the first birthday.
- This study establishes a lower bound for the precision of early infant word representations.
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