Work

In the Infant’s Mind’s Ear

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: Do infants implicitly name visually fixated objects whose names are known, and does this information influence their preference for looking at other objects? We presented 18-month-old infants with a picture-based phonological priming task and examined their recognition of named targets in primed (e.g., dog-door) and unrelated (e.g., dog-boat) trials. Infants showed better recognition of the target object in primed than in unrelated trials across three measures. As the prime image was never explicitly named during the experiment, the only explanation for the systematic influence of the prime image on target recognition is that infants, like adults, can implicitly name visually fixated images and that these implicitly generated names can prime infants' subsequent responses in a paired visual-object spoken-word-recognition task.

Source: Psychological Science

DOI: 10.1177/0956797610373371

Authors: Nivedita Mani, Kim Plunkett

Institutions: University of Göttingen, University of Oxford

Language: English

Topic: Language Development and Disorders

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Awards: G6499531057, Phonological Specification of Vowels in Early Lexical Representations, G841499813