INFANTS MEMORY FOR SPOKEN WORDS

Infants' long-term retention of the sound patterns of words was explor ed by exposing them to recordings of three children's stories for 10 d ays during a 2-week period when they were 8 months old, After an inter val of 2 weeks, the infants heard lists of words that either occurred frequently or did not occur in the stories. The infants listened signi ficantly longer to the lists of story words. By comparison, a control group of infants who had not been exposed to the stories showed no suc h preference. The findings suggest that 8-month-olds are beginning to engage in long-term storage of words that occur frequently in speech, which is an important prerequisite for learning language.