Making Sense of Infant Familiarity and Novelty Responses to Words at Lexical Onset

Abstract

This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants), novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar) and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words). The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed no-preference. The results provide partial support for Hunter and Ames’ (1988) developmental model of attention in infancy and suggest caution when interpreting studies indexed to chronological age.

Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development

“…When a child first begins producing one consonant stably and consistently, as established by VMS identification, he or she is particularly attentive to that speech sound in input word forms (as shown in Majorano et al ., ). When the child has advanced to production at VMS level of more than a single consonant, the known (VMS) consonants no longer hold his or her attention; instead, the child seems to discover a world of varied stimuli and to begin to attend more to what is novel or unfamiliar (for further discussion see DePaolis, Keren‐Portnoy, & Vihman, ; Vihman et al ., ). This series of studies solidly establishes an effect of the child's own level of production of speech sounds on the way she processes or represents those sounds.…”

“…For example, DePaolis et al . () relate vocal production to word‐form recognition at 10 months; Horváth et al . () show, at 16 months, a correlation between reported expressive vocabulary size and novel word learning; and Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto () demonstrate that expressive vocabulary size, not age, is the best predictor of processing speed at 18 and 21 months.…”

“…Herbert, Gross, and Hayne (2007) provide direct evidence of an effect on memory retrieval of experience with action, and similar effects of previous experience or knowledge on new learning can be inferred from several other studies. For example, DePaolis et al (2016) relate vocal production to word-form recognition at 10 months; Horv ath et al (2015) show, at 16 months, a correlation between reported expressive vocabulary size and novel word learning; and Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto (2001) demonstrate that expressive vocabulary size, not age, is the best predictor of processing speed at 18 and 21 months. Jab es and Nelson interpret the findings from studies of relational memory for visual events, which shows steady improvement over the first 2 years, as suggesting that infants might learn the relation between items and their context, but .…”

Experience with research paradigms relates to infants’ direction of preference

“…The infant's position along this continuum seems to be determined by a variety of factors related to the task and/or age (e.g., Aslin, 2007; Houston‐Price & Nakai, 2004; Hunter & Ames, 1988). However, it is frequently the case that the observed direction of preference does not conform with expectations based on these dimensions; the infancy literature is rife with examples of counterintuitive patterns of preference (e.g., Bosch & Sebastian‐Galles, 2001; Dawson & Gerken, 2009; DePaolis et al, 2016; Fiser & Aslin, 2001; Johnson et al, 2009; Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995; Sebastian‐Galles & Bosch, 2009; Thiessen, 2012).…”

Segmentation of Rhythmic Units in Word Speech by Japanese Infants and Toddlers

“…If the infants or toddlers correctly perceived the number of syllables concerning the relevant word sounds, we expected that the amount of time they spent looking toward the ball stimuli would differ between the match and non-match conditions. A significant difference in looking time during two conditions (matched familiar and non-matched novel conditions) has been regarded as evidence that a child can distinguish between them, and thus, that they can correctly perceive the number of stimuli (Gerken et al, 2015;DePaolis et al, 2016). The condition during which the child spends more time looking at the stimuli is not clear: some studies have reported that familiar stimuli received more attention (i.e., longer looking time) from infants and toddlers during modality-matching in a visual-auditory setting (e.g., Starkey et al, 1983;Golinkoff et al, 1987), whereas other studies have reported that unexpected events received greater attention from infants (Mix et al, 1997;Kobayashi et al, 2005).…”