The Comprehension Boost in Early Word Learning: Older Infants Are Better Learners.

ABSTRACT: Recent research has revealed that infants begin understanding words at around 6 months. After that, infants' comprehension vocabulary increases gradually in a linear way over 8-18 months, according to data from parental checklists. In contrast, infants' word comprehension improves robustly, qualitatively, and in a nonlinear way just after their first birthday, according to data from studies on spoken word comprehension. In this review, I integrate observational and experimental data to explain these divergent results. I argue that infants' comprehension boost is not well-explained by changes in their language input for common words, but rather by proposing that they learn to take better advantage of relatively stable input data. Next, I propose potentially complementary theoretical account

SUBMITTER: Bergelson E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7872330 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature