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...