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Word knowledge in six- to nine-month-old Norwegian infants? Not without additional frequency cues.

ABSTRACT: The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the meaning of several words. To reach this conclusion, researchers presented infants with pairs of pictures from distinct semantic domains and observed longer looks at an object upon hearing its name as compared with the name of the other object. However, these gaze patterns might indicate infants' sensibility to the word frequency and/or its contextual relatedness to the object regardless of a firm semantic understanding of this word. The current study attempted, first, to replicate, in Norwegian language, the results of recent studies showing that six- to nine-month-old English-learning infants understand the meaning of many common words. Second, it assessed the robustness of a 'comprehension' interpretation by dissociating semantic knowledge from confounded extra-linguistic cues via the manipulation of the contingency between words and objects. Our planned analyses revealed that Norwegian six- to nine-month-old infants did not understand the meaning of the words used in the study. Our exploratory analyses showed evidence of word comprehension at eight to nine months of age-rather than from six to seven months of age for English-learning infants-suggesting that there are cross-linguistic differences in the onset of word comprehension. In addition, our study revealed that eight- to nine-month-old infants cannot rely exclusively on single extra-linguistic cues to disambiguate between two items, thus suggesting the existence of early word-object mappings. However, these mappings are weak, as infants need additional cues (such as an imbalance in frequency of word use) to reveal word recognition. Our results suggest that the very onset of word comprehension is not based on the infants' knowledge of words per se. Rather, infants use a converging set of cues to identify referents, among which frequency is a robust (pre-semantic) cue that infants exploit to guide object disambiguation and, in turn, learn new words.

SUBMITTER: Kartushina N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6774954 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Word knowledge in six- to nine-month-old Norwegian infants? Not without additional frequency cues.

Kartushina Natalia N Mayor Julien J

Royal Society open science 20190925 9

The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the meaning of several words. To reach this conclusion, researchers presented infants with pairs of pictures from distinct semantic domains and observed longer looks at an object upon hearing its name as compared with the name of the other object. However, these gaze patterns might indicate infants' sensibility to the word frequency and/or its contextual relatedness to the object regardless of a firm sem ...[more]

PMID: 31598270

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Project description:ObjectivesWideband acoustic transfer functions (WATF) measured in the ear canal have been shown to be effective in the diagnosis of middle ear dysfunction in adults and in newborn infants. Although these measures would be diagnostically useful in older infants, normative data on a large number of older infants are lacking. The goal of this study was to provide such normative data.DesignThe WATF of 458 infants aged 2 to 9 mos and of 210 adults were obtained. Wideband reactance (X), resistance (R), and energy reflectance (ER) were measured in third-octave bands between 250 and 8000 Hz. The effects of age and gender on the WATF were examined, and the WATF in the left and right ears were compared. Test-retest reliability was assessed, and the relationship between the 226-Hz tympanogram and the WATF was examined.ResultsThe results agreed well with previous reports testing fewer subjects, which documented age-related change in these measures during infancy and between infancy and adulthood. Test-retest correlations within third octaves were 0.5 to 0.7 at best, but did not vary systematically with age. Infants' test-retest absolute differences within third octaves for R and ER were similar to those of adults. The shape of the WATF on retest was highly repeatable, and the shapes of the WATF in the ears of the same individual were qualitatively similar. The wideband impedance results were not different in the left and right ears, but ER was slightly, but significantly, lower in the left ear than that in the right ear. Resistance and reactance magnitude were greater for females than males, but there was no effect of gender on ER. Infants whose 226-Hz tympanogram indicated reduced peak admittance (Types As and B) had greater resistance and reactance magnitude than those with normal peak admittance (Types A and C), but no tympanometry group differences were evident in ER.ConclusionsAge-graded norms are essential to the successful clinical application of WATF. However, the effects of gender and laterality on the WATF are small.

Dataset Information

Word knowledge in six- to nine-month-old Norwegian infants? Not without additional frequency cues.

Publications

Word knowledge in six- to nine-month-old Norwegian infants? Not without additional frequency cues.

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