Using home video recordings, the researchers also observed that the infants learned to recognize words better when they could see the objects as the words were being used (for example, when they were told, "here's your spoon," when the spoon was actually present). That is, perhaps infants know ‘car’ cannot refer to juice, but not whether stroller is in the ‘car’ category.” Infants, the authors suggest, “may know enough about a word’s meaning to tell it apart from the unrelated referent but not the related one. Using eye tracking, the researchers found that infants looked significantly more at pictures of named objects (“car,” for example) when the objects were paired with unrelated objects (like a picture of a car with a picture of juice) than when the objects were paired with related objects (like a picture of a car with a picture of a stroller). True word learning requires making connections between speech and the world around us and learning how different words relate to each other.īergelson's team studied 6-month-old babies to see whether they recognized these connections, as opposed to merely recognizing words in isolation.
“While they still have a lot to learn before they show adult-like or even toddler-like levels of comprehension, this gives us a peek into how those early words and concepts are organized.” Elika Bergelson from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina told Reuters Health by email. "I think it's especially intriguing that we find evidence that for infants, even their early words aren't 'islands': even with a very small vocabulary they seem to have a sense that some words and concepts are more 'similar' than others,” Dr. (Reuters Health) - Babies begin to learn words and what they mean well before they begin talking, and researchers are beginning to understand how they do it.