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 extralinguistic cues. Two experiments were run to compare infants' interest for familiar words, chosen in the early productive vocabulary of young infants, against rare words infrequent in French usage. Both experiments used a preference paradigm in which preference was indexed by attention span. Lists of familiar words were auditorily presented to each child in the absence of any possible referent object. A preference for familiar words was found to be very consistent in 12-month-olds and just emerging in 11-month-olds. These results were interpreted as revealing the existence of a developing receptive lexicon by 11 months of age.