Infants exploit vowels to label objects and actions from continuous audiovisual stimuli.

Before the 6-months of age, infants succeed to learn words associated with objects and actions when the words are presented isolated or embedded in short utterances. It remains unclear whether such type of learning occurs from fluent audiovisual stimuli, although in natural environments the fluent audiovisual contexts are the default. In 4 experiments, we evaluated if 8-month-old infants could learn word-action and word-object associations from fluent audiovisual streams when the words conveyed either vowel or consonant harmony, two phonological cues that benefit word learning near 6 and 12 months of age, respectively.

Severe respiratory disease caused by human respiratory syncytial virus impairs language learning during early infancy.

Human respiratory syncytial virus infection is a leading cause of pediatric morbidity and mortality. A previous murine study showed that during severe acute respiratory infections the virus invades the central nervous system, and that infected animals evolve with long-lasting learning difficulties associated with long-term potentiation impairment in their hippocampus. We hypothesized here that human infants who presented a severe episode of respiratory syncytial virus infection before 6 months of age would develop long-term learning difficulties.