The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size
Abstract
What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (1984) · Infant Behavior and Development · doi:10.1016/s0163-6383(84)80022-3 · Cited by 2,801 · cited 1×
“…consonant and vowel distinctions that have phonemic significance (are used to distinguish meaning) in their native language (Best, McRoberts, LaFleur, & Silver-Isenstadt, 1995; Pegg & Werker, 1997; Polka & Werker, 1994; Tsao, Liu, Kuhl, & Tseng, 2000; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 1984).”
BackgroundSelf-citationFour-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese
Fernald, A. (1985) · Infant Behavior and Development · doi:10.1016/s0163-6383(85)80005-9 · Cited by 1,015
Infants' Preference for the Predominant Stress Patterns of English Words
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N. J. (1993) · Child Development · doi:10.2307/1131210 · Cited by 981
Cross-language speech perception: Initial capabilities and developmental change.
Werker, J. F., & Lalonde, C. E. (1988) · Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1037/0012-1649.24.5.672 · Cited by 607
Self-citationWerker, J. F., & McLeod, P. J. (1989) · Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie · doi:10.1037/h0084224 · Cited by 448
Self-citationInfants' Reliance on a Social Criterion for Establishing Word-Object Relations
Baldwin, D. A., Markman, E. M., Bill, B., Desjardins, R. N., Irwin, J. M., & Tidball, G. (1996) · Child Development · doi:10.2307/1131771 · Cited by 398
Discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by one- to four-month-old infants
Karzon, R. G. (1985) · Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · doi:10.1016/0022-0965(85)90044-x · Cited by 167
Cited by
Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code
Kuhl, P. K. (2004) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn1533 · Cited by 2,291
Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination
Maye, J., Werker, J. F., & Gerken, L. (2002) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(01)00157-3 · Cited by 1,364
Self-citationKuhl, P. K., Conboy, B. T., Coffey-Corina, S., Padden, D., Rivera-Gaxiola, M., & Nelson, T. (2008) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2154 · Cited by 886
Critical periods in speech perception: New directions
Werker, J. F., & Hensch, T. K. (2015) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015104 · Cited by 774
Self-citationFernald, A., Perfors, A., & Marchman, V. A. (2006) · Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1037/0012-1649.42.1.98 · Cited by 621
Metadata
- Authors
- Werker, J. F., Fennell, C. T., Corcoran, K. M., & Stager, C. L.
- Venue
- Infancy
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2002-01
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-30
- ISSN
- 1525-0008 (ISSN-L)
- 1532-7078
- OpenAlex
- W2139380752
- Cited by
- 429
- References
- 7
- FWCI
- 21.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1207/s15327078in0301_1
- The paper
- Werker, J. F., Fennell, C. T., Corcoran, K. M., & Stager, C. L. (2002). Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size. Infancy. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327078in0301_1
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
