Pw. Jusczyk et al., YOUNG INFANTS RETENTION OF INFORMATION ABOUT BISYLLABIC UTTERANCES, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 21(4), 1995, pp. 822-836
This study examined 2- to 3-month-olds' representations of bisyllables
. In 3 experiments, infants were familiarized with sets of bisyllables
that either did or did not share a common consonant-vowel (CV) syllab
le. In Experiment 1, infants detected the presence of a new bisyllable
in the test phase except when it shared a common initial CV syllable.
A modified version of the high-amplitude sucking (HAS) procedure, inc
orporating a 2-min delay period, tested infants' retention of informat
ion about bisyllables in the remaining 2 experiments. In Experiment 2,
infants were significantly more likely to retain information about bi
syllables that shared the same initial CV syllable. Finally, the autho
rs investigated whether infants simply benefited from the presence of
2 common phonetic segments, regardless of whether these came from the
same CV syllable. The results showed that CV syllable organization is
important in infants' ability to encode and retain information about b
isyllables.