Infants’ Developing Competence in Recognizing and Understanding Words in Fluent Speech

Abstract

Again and again in research on early cognitive development, infants turn out to be smarter than we thought they were. The refinement of experimental tech-niques for reading infants ' minds has been extremely productive, enabling us to study developing capabilities which are not yet observable in spontaneous behavior. When the task demands are made simple enough, infants demonstrate implicit knowledge across diverse domains ranging from understanding of the physical world and numerical concepts to social cognition (see Wellman & Gelman 1998). In the domain of language understanding as well, such techniques have been used to reveal the early emergence of linguistic competence before it is evident in overt behavior, and many ingenious experiments have demonstrated the considerable speech processing savvy of infants in the first year. These studies show that certain perceptual skills essential for spoken language under-standing emerge gradually over the first year, often months before infants are able to display their linguistic knowledge through speech production (see Aslin, Jusczyk & Pisoni 1998). Our own recent research on word recognition by older

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