It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is flawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6-to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.word learning | cognitive development | infant cognition

The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from 'healthy' speech; and in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge series.

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.

Recent research reported the surprising finding that even 6-moolds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:3253-3258]. However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like older learners? We test 6-moolds for a hallmark of the mature lexicon: cross-word relations. We also examine whether properties of the home environment that have been linked with lexical knowledge in older children are detectable in the initial stage of comprehension. We use a new dataset, which includes in-lab comprehension and home measures from the same infants. We find evidence for cross-word structure: On seeing two images of common nouns, infants looked significantly more at named target images when the competitor images were semantically unrelated (e.g., milk and foot) than when they were related (e.g., milk and juice), just as older learners do. We further find initial evidence for home-lab links: common noun "copresence" (i.e., whether words' referents were present and attended to in home recordings) correlated with in-lab comprehension. These findings suggest that, even in neophyte word learners, cross-word relations are formed early and the home learning environment measurably helps shape the lexicon from the outset.word learning | lexicon | cognitive development | language acquisition | environmental effects T o learn words, infants integrate their linguistic experienceswith word forms and the conceptual categories to which they refer. They do this fast: A growing literature demonstrates that, by around 6 mo, infants have begun understanding nouns (1-5), suggesting they form word-referent links from their environment in the first half-year.The speech-sound learning trajectory in year one is relatively well-established (6): Infants' language-specific sensitivity emerges around 6 mo for vowels, and 12 mo for consonants (7,8). Indeed, by 12 mo, infants reveal robust phonetic representations for common words (9-11), and fine-grained knowledge of native language speech-sound combinatorics (12). Before this, their sensitivity to phonemic and talker-specific differences can be fragile (3,13).In contrast, early meaning is understudied: It's not clear what makes the first words infants understand learnable, or what aspects of meaning infants initially represent. This is partly because meaning components are not straightforward. While phonetic features (e.g., voicing) let us readily quantify speechsound differences, characterizing meaning is harder; consider describing or comparing how "dog" and "log" sound versus what they mean. While toddlers are sensitive to visual similarity, shape, and semantic category (14-17), little is known about nascent semantic representations.Regarding early semantics, Arias-Trejo and Plunkett (18) find that both visual similarity and category membership contribute to semantic competition: For toddlers, understanding "shoe" in the context of a boot and a shoe was harder than when shoe appeared with a hat or bin instead. Thus, even in seasoned word learners, certa...