INFANTS REMEMBER THE ORDER OF WORDS IN A SPOKEN SENTENCE

.The ability to remember sequential order information is an important component in the learning and mastery of many complex cognitive skills . Notably, it is critical for learning language. This study investigat ed whether infants are capable of remembering the order of words in an English sentence and, especially whether the structure afforded by na tural sentential prosody enhances their ability to do so. This study c ompares 2-month-olds' abilities to detect changes in word order, after a 2-min delay, for sequences spoken as a well-formed sentence versus as two unrelated, but well-formed, sentential fragments. The results i ndicate that infants exposed to the single sentences were able to dete ct changes in word order. By comparison, infants exposed to the senten tial fragments showed no tendency to detect the same word order change s. Thus, even at two months of age, infants are able to remember the o rder of spoken words when they are embedded within the coherent prosod ic structure of a single well-formed sentence.