THE FORMAT OF REPRESENTATION OF RECOGNIZED WORDS IN INFANTS EARLY RECEPTIVE LEXICON

Eleven-month-olds can recognize a few auditorily presented familiar wo rds in experimental situations where no hints are given by the intonat ion, the situation, or the presence of possible visual referents. That is, infants of this age (and possibly somewhat younger) can recognize words based on sound patterns alone. The issue addressed in this arti cle is what is the type of mental representations infants use to code words they recognize. The results of a series of experiments with Fren ch-learning infants indicate that word representations in 11-month-old s are segmentally underspecified and suggest that they are all the mor e underspecified when infants engage in recognizing words rather than merely attending to meaningless speech sounds. But underspecification has limits, which were explored here with respect to word-initial cons onants. The last two experiments show the way to investigating further these limits for word-initial consonants as well as for segments in o ther word positions. In French, infants' word representations are flex ible enough to allow for structural changes in the voicing or even in the manner of articulation of word-initial consonants. Word-initial co nsonants must be present, however, for words to be recognized. In conc lusion, a parallel is proposed between the emerging capacities to igno re variations that are irrelevant for word recognition in a ''lexical mode'' and to ignore variations that are phonemically irrelevant in a ''neutral mode'' of listening to native speech.