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Twelve-month-olds learn novel word–object pairings differing only in stress pattern*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2009

SUZANNE CURTIN
SUZANNE CURTIN*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
*
Address for correspondence: Suzanne Curtin, Department of Psychology, 2500 University Drive NW, University of Calgary, Calgary, ABCanada, T2N 1N4. tel: 403-220-7670; fax: 403-282-8249; email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Infants at 1 ; 2 demonstrate difficulty in accessing subtle phonetic information about newly learned word–object pairings (Stager & Werker, 1997). In this study, we examined whether or not infants can access subtle prosodic information such as lexical stress in a word learning task. We tested infants younger than 1 ; 2 to see if they could learn two new word–object associations that differ only in stress pattern (Sww versus wSw). Our results are the first to demonstrate that, even without contextual support, infants at 1 ; 0 succeed at this task, suggesting that the salient acoustic properties associated with lexical stress facilitate word–object associative learning.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1157 - 1165
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a University of Calgary Research Grant (F1031006113). Thanks to Natasha Nickel and especially to Susan Graham for their assistance with this research. Thanks also to the families who participated in this research.

References

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