Laboratorio de Neurociencias Cognitivas, Escuela de Psicología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chie, P.O. 7820436, Santiago de Chile, Chile.
Departamento de Ciencias de la Salud, Facultad de Medicina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, P.O. 7820436, Santiago de Chile, Chile.
Sci Rep. 2021 May 26;11(1):10982. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-90326-z.
Before the 6-months of age, infants succeed to learn words associated with objects and actions when the words are presented isolated or embedded in short utterances. It remains unclear whether such type of learning occurs from fluent audiovisual stimuli, although in natural environments the fluent audiovisual contexts are the default. In 4 experiments, we evaluated if 8-month-old infants could learn word-action and word-object associations from fluent audiovisual streams when the words conveyed either vowel or consonant harmony, two phonological cues that benefit word learning near 6 and 12 months of age, respectively. We found that infants learned both types of words, but only when the words contained vowel harmony. Because object- and action-words have been conceived as rudimentary representations of nouns and verbs, our results suggest that vowels contribute to shape the initial steps of the learning of lexical categories in preverbal infants.
在 6 个月之前，当婴儿听到孤立或嵌入在短语句中的与物体和动作相关的单词时，他们能够成功地学习这些单词。目前还不清楚这种类型的学习是否来自流畅的视听刺激，尽管在自然环境中，流畅的视听背景是默认的。在 4 项实验中，我们评估了 8 个月大的婴儿是否能够从流畅的视听流中学习单词-动作和单词-对象的关联，当单词传达元音或辅音和谐时，这两个语音线索分别在 6 个月和 12 个月左右有利于单词学习。我们发现婴儿学习了这两种类型的单词，但只有当单词包含元音和谐时才会学习。因为物体和动作的单词被认为是名词和动词的基本表示，我们的结果表明，元音有助于形成婴儿在言语前学习词汇类别的初始步骤。
