The maluma/takete effect is late: No longitudinal evidence for shape sound symbolism in the first year.

The maluma/takete effect refers to an association between certain language sounds (e.g., /m/ and /o/) and round shapes, and other language sounds (e.

Boosting the input: 9-month-olds' sensitivity to low-frequency phonotactic patterns in novel wordforms.

To learn their first words, infants must attend to a variety of cues that signal word boundaries. One such cue infants might use is the language-specific phonotactics to track legal combinations and positions of segments within a word. Studies have demonstrated that, when tested across statistically high and low phonotactics, infants repeatedly reject the low-frequency wordforms.

Fourteen-month-olds' sensitivity to acoustic salience in minimal pair word learning.

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object-word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids) facilitates success in the Switch Task.

Nine-month-olds use frequency of onset clusters to segment novel words.

Before their first birthday, infants have started to identify and use information about their native language, such as frequent words, transitional probabilities, and co-occurrence of segments (phonotactics), to identify viable word boundaries. These cues can then be used to segment new words from running speech. We explored whether infants are capable of detecting a novel word form using the frequency of occurrence of the onset alone to further characterize the role of phonotactics in speech segmentation.

The flexibility of 12-month-olds' preferences for phonologically appropriate object labels.

We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound-object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets of Czech words with onsets that are illegal in English (e.

Perceiving onset clusters in infancy.

By 9-months infants are sensitive to native-language sound combinations. Our studies show that while younger infants discriminate clusters, they are not sensitive to differences in statistical frequency. Thus, the emergence of phonotactic knowledge is driven by experience with the frequency of occurrence of the sound combinations in one's language.