EMERGENCE OF AN EARLY RECEPTIVE LEXICON - INFANTS RECOGNITION OF WORDS

This experiment examines whether 11-month-old and 12-month-old infants are able to recognize familiar words in a situation yielding no extra linguistic cues. Two experiments were run to compare infants' interest for familiar words, chosen in the early productive vocabulary of youn g infants, against rare words infrequent in French usage. Both experim ents used a preference paradigm in which preference was indexed by att ention span. Lists of familiar words were auditorily presented to each child in the absence of any possible referent object. A preference fo r familiar words was found to be very consistent in 12-month-olds and just emerging in 11-month-olds. These results were interpreted as reve aling the existence of a developing receptive lexicon by 11 months of age.