Familiar words capture the attention of 11-month-olds in less than 250 ms

Abstract

The capacity of human infants to discriminate contrasting speech sounds specializes to the native language by the end of the ¢rst year of life, when the ¢rst signs of word recognition have also been found, using behavioural measures. The extent of voluntary attentional involvement in such word recognition has not been explored, however, nor do we know what its neural time-course may be. Here we demonstrate that 11-month-old children shift their attention automatically to familiar words within 250 ms of presentation onset by measuring event-related potentials elicited by familiar and unfamiliar words. A signi¢cant modulation of the ¢rst negative peak (N200), known to index implicit change detection in adults, was induced by word familiarity in the infants.

Electrophysiological evidence of early word learning

“…A similar negative middle-latency familiarity effect (i.e., N200-500) has been observed in two types of auditory word processing studies in infants: both for words rated by parents as known versus unknown to their child (e.g., Mills, Coffey-Corina, & Neville, 1993Thierry et al, 2003), as well as for unknown but familiarized words versus unfamiliarized words (e.g., Kooijman et al, 2005). Although Mills and colleagues showed that the N200-500 for 20-month-olds is related to word meaning and not to word familiarity (Mills, Plunkett, Prat, & Schafer, 2005), Junge and colleagues hypothesized that for younger infants the same recognition mechanism is sensitive to word form repetition, so that meanings of words can be learned (Junge, Hagoort, Kooijman, & Cutler, 2010;Junge, Kooijman, Hagoort, & Cutler, 2012).…”

“…This is the case for known versus unknown single words (e.g., Thierry, Vihman, & Roberts, 2003) as well as for familiarized versus unfamiliarized low-frequency word forms in continuous speech (e.g., Kooijman, Hagoort, & Cutler, 2005;Goyet, de Schonen, & Nazzi, 2010). The N200-500 has also been reported in studies of novel word-to-world mappings in 6-and 14-monthold infants: ERPs time-locked to the onset of words revealed that the more often words were consistently presented with the same novel objects, the larger the N200-500 (Friedrich & Friederici, 2008Torkildsen et al, 2009; note however that for 6-month-olds in the 2011 study this effect appeared not only when words were consistently paired with novel objects, but also when novel words were randomly paired with objects, so that it could have been evoked by auditory word repetition rather than by word-object integration).…”

Semantic sentence processing reflected in the event-related potentials of one- and two-year-old children

“…Significant interactions including Condition were further analysed by one-way ANOVAs. In all ANOVAs, the Greenhouse-Geisser correction [13] was applied, whenever there was more than one degree of freedom. Here, we report uncorrected degrees of freedom, and adjusted p-values.…”

Renewal of the Neurophysiology of Language: Functional Neuroimaging

“…Thierry et al (397) recently reported a MMN-like effect in 11-mo-old babies induced by the familiarity of English words. They presented 58 familiar words randomly intermixed with 58 rare words matched for length, number of syllables, and phonotactic structure.…”

“…This modulation was compared with the MMN because 11-moold infants are likely to know only a very limited number of the words selected a priori as "familiar words." Thierry et al (397) interpreted this effect as a sign of automatic attentional involvement triggered by the phonological familiarity of the initial diphone or triphone of the stimuli.…”