YOUNG INFANTS RETENTION OF INFORMATION ABOUT SYLLABLES

This study examines 2- to 3-month-olds' retention of speech informatio n over brief delay intervals. A modified version of the high-amplitude sucking procedure, incorporating a 2-min delay period was used to tes t the infants' retention of information about a set of syllables to wh ich they had been habituated. A series of four experiments was conduct ed to obtain information about the degree of detail present in infants ' representations and to investigate factors potentially affecting the infants' encoding and retention of speech sounds. The results indicat ed that infants are able to retain sufficient detail about syllables o ver a 2-min delay period to detect changes involving a single phonetic feature. The infants were successful even when the members of the fam iliarization set shared no common phonetic elements. These findings ar e discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the acqui sition of native language sound categories and the development of the mental lexicon.