TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of association in early word-learning
AU - Marcus, Gary F.
AU - Fernandes, Keith J.
AU - Johnson, Scott P.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Word-learning likely involves a multiplicity of components, some domain-general, others domain-specific. Against the background of recent studies that suggest that word-learning is domain-specific, we investigated the associative component of word-learning. Sevenand 14-month-old infants viewed a pair of events in which a monkey or a truck moved back and forth, accompanied by a sung syllable or a tone, matched for pitch. Following habituation, infants were presented with displays in which the visual-auditory pairings were preserved or switched, and looked longer at the "switch" events when exposure time was sufficient to learn the intermodal association. At 7 months, performance on speech and tones conditions was statistically identical; at 14 months, infants had begun to favor speech. Thus, the associative component of word-learning does not appear (in contrast to rule-learning, Marcus et al., 2007) to initially privilege speech.
AB - Word-learning likely involves a multiplicity of components, some domain-general, others domain-specific. Against the background of recent studies that suggest that word-learning is domain-specific, we investigated the associative component of word-learning. Sevenand 14-month-old infants viewed a pair of events in which a monkey or a truck moved back and forth, accompanied by a sung syllable or a tone, matched for pitch. Following habituation, infants were presented with displays in which the visual-auditory pairings were preserved or switched, and looked longer at the "switch" events when exposure time was sufficient to learn the intermodal association. At 7 months, performance on speech and tones conditions was statistically identical; at 14 months, infants had begun to favor speech. Thus, the associative component of word-learning does not appear (in contrast to rule-learning, Marcus et al., 2007) to initially privilege speech.
KW - Association
KW - Cognitive development
KW - Word-learning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84867135009&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00283
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00283
M3 - Article
C2 - 22934086
AN - SCOPUS:84867135009
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 3
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
IS - AUG
M1 - Article 283
ER -