Six-Month-Olds Comprehend Words That Refer to Parts of the Body.

Comprehending spoken words requires a lexicon of sound patterns and knowledge of their referents in the world. Tincoff and Jusczyk (1999) demonstrated that 6-month-olds link the sound patterns "Mommy" and "Daddy" to video images of their parents, but not to other adults. This finding suggests that comprehension emerges at this young age and might take the form of very specific word-world links, as in "Mommy" referring only to the infant's mother and "Daddy" referring only to the infant's father.

Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis.

Two studies examined relationships between infants' early speech processing performance and later language and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 found that performance on speech segmentation tasks before 12 months of age related to expressive vocabulary at 24 months. However, performance on other tasks was not related to 2-year vocabulary.

English-learning infants' segmentation of verbs from fluent speech.

Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also influence verb segmentation. Our results establish the early emergence of verb segmentation in English: by 13.

Infants' use of synchronized visual information to separate streams of speech.

In 4 studies, 7.5-month-olds used synchronized visual-auditory correlations to separate a target speech stream when a distractor passage was presented at equal loudness. Infants succeeded in a segmentation task (using the head-turn preference procedure with video familiarization) when a video of the talker's face was synchronized with the target passage (Experiment 1, N = 30).

Infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words and voices.

Infants' long-term memory for the phonological patterns of words versus the indexical properties of talkers' voices was examined in 3 experiments using the Headturn Preference Procedure (D. G. Kemler Nelson et al.

Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants.

The Possible Word Constraint limits the number of lexical candidates considered in speech recognition by stipulating that input should be parsed into a string of lexically viable chunks. For instance, an isolated single consonant is not a feasible word candidate. Any segmentation containing such a chunk is disfavored.

Some critical developments in acquiring native language sound organization during the first year.

Although infants are born with rather sophisticated capacities for discriminating and categorizing speech sounds, they still must learn about the sound organization of their native language. Before 6 months, infants show relatively little sensitivity to native language versus non-native language sound organization. Shortly thereafter, infants recognize which sounds and sound sequences and rhythmic patterns are likely to appear in native language words.

Six-Month-Olds' Detection of Clauses Embedded in Continuous Speech: Effects of Prosodic Well-Formedness.

Three experiments investigated the role of prosodic structure for infants' recognition of embedded word sequences. Six-month-olds were familiarized with 2 versions of the same sequence, 1 corresponding to a well-formed prosodic unit and the other to a prosodically ill-formed sequence (although a successive word series). Next, infants heard 2 test passages.

INFANTS' RECOGNITION OF THE SOUND PATTERNS OF THEIR OWN NAMES.

Among the earliest and most frequent words that infants hear are their names. Yet little is known about when infants begin to recognize their own names. Using a modified version of the head-turn preference procedure, we tested whether 4.