Early Word Learners' Ability to Access Phonetic Detail in Well-Known Words

Abstract

Several recent studiesfrom our laboratory have shown that14-month old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switcht task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have argued that this wordlearning failure results from a processingoverload. Herewe explore how infants perform in the Switch task with already known minimally different words. The experiment involved the same phonetic difference as used inour earlier word learning studies. Following habituation to two familiar minimal pairobject-label combinations(ball and doll), infants of 14months looked longer to aviolation in the object label pairing(e.g., label `ball'pairedwith object doll) than to an appropriate pairing. These resultsusing well known words are consistent withthe pattern of data recently obtained by Swingley and Aslin(2002) in which it was found that infants of 14 months looklonger tothe correct object when the accompanying well known word is spoken correctly rather than mispronounced. We discuss how these results are compatible with the limited resource explanation originally offered by Stager and Werker (1997).