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 4.5-month-olds preferred to listen to their own names over foils that were either matched or mismatched for stress pattern. Our findings provide the first evidence that even these young infants recognize the sound patterns of their own names. Infants demonstrated significant preferences for their own names compared with foils that shared the same stress patterns, as well as foils with opposite patterns. The results indicate when infants begin to recognize sound patterns of items frequently uttered in the infants' environments.Research on early cognitive and perceptual capacities indicates that infants enter the world equipped with a surprisingly broad set of abilities. For example, infants seem to have a notion of physical identity that matches adult conceptions of object properties. Not only do young infants demonstrate sensitivity to the relative permanence of objects (Baillargeon, Graber, DeVos, & Black, 1990), they also appear to have at least a rudimentary understanding of causal relations (Leslie & Keeble, 1987) and of number (Starkey, Spelke, & Gelman, 1990; Wynn, 1992).The precocious capacities of infants are perhaps best documented for the domain of language. It is well established that within the first 2 months of life, infants are able to discriminate a wide range of speech contrasts (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971;Trehub, 1976). Moreover, they appear to be able to compensate for stimulus variability introduced into speech by changes in speaking rate (Eimas & Miller, 1980) and talkers' voices (Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992;Kuhl, 1979). These early abilities allow infants to begin the process of categorizing the information available in speech and ultimately lead to acquisition of a native language.Infants' basic speech perception capacities provide a starting point for discovering how sound patterns are organized in their native language. Because languages differ in their Copyright © 1995 (Mehler et al., 1988). There are also indications that within the 1st year, infants learn about various aspects of sound organization in their native language: phonetic categories and their internal structure (Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda, Stevens, & Lindblom, 1992;Werker & Tees, 1984), the characteristic sequences of sounds permitted in words (Jusczyk, Friederici, Wessels, Svenkerud, & Jusczyk, 1993), and the prosody typical of words (Jusczyk, Cutler, & Redanz, 1993). However, communication in language requires not only learning about the distinctive sound properties of one's language, but also learning to recognize certain sound patterns and to relate these to particular meanings.Whereas many investigations have focused on infants' sensitivities to various sound properties of language, relatively few studies have explored the antecedents of relating sounds to m...
