ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Word knowledge in six- to nine-month-old Norwegian infants? Not without additional frequency cues.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Interrogating Early Word Knowledge: Factors That Influence the Alignment Between Caregiver-Report and Experimental Measures.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Modal and amodal cognition: an overarching principle in various domains of psychology.Psychological research · 2024Review
- Meaning as mentalization.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- Moving beyond "nouns in the lab": Using naturalistic data to understand why infants' first words include uh-oh and hi.Developmental psychology · 2023Article
- Discourse with Few Words: Coherence Statistics, Parent-Infant Actions on Objects, and Object Names.Language acquisition · 2023Article
- Coping with dialects from birth: Role of variability on infants' early language development. Insights from Norwegian dialects.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Real-world statistics at two timescales and a mechanism for infant learning of object names.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning.Annual review of linguistics · 2022Article
- Fine-tuning language discrimination: Bilingual and monolingual infants' detection of language switching.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · 2021Article
- Visual and haptic responses as measures of word comprehension and speed of processing in toddlers: Relative predictive utility.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2021Article
- No Evidence of Robust Noun-Referent Associations in German-Learning 6- to 14-Month-Olds.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Comprehension Boost in Early Word Learning: Older Infants Are Better Learners.Child development perspectives · 2020Article
- Article
- Becoming word meaning experts: Infants' processing of familiar words in the context of typical and atypical exemplars.Child developmentArticle
- Infants' Knowledge of Individual Words: Investigating Links Between Parent Report and Looking Time.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the meaning of several words. To reach this conclusion, researchers presented infants with pairs of pictures from distinct semantic domains and observed longer looks at an object upon hearing its name as compared with the name of the other object. However, these gaze patterns might indicate infants' sensibility to the word frequency and/or its contextual relatedness to the object regardless of a firm semantic understanding of this word. The current study attempted, first, to replicate, in Norwegian language, the results of recent studies showing that six- to nine-month-old English-learning infants understand the meaning of many common words. Second, it assessed the robustness of a 'comprehension' interpretation by dissociating semantic knowledge from confounded extra-linguistic cues via the manipulation of the contingency between words and objects. Our planned analyses revealed that Norwegian six- to nine-month-old infants did not understand the meaning of the words used in the study. Our exploratory analyses showed evidence of word comprehension at eight to nine months of age-rather than from six to seven months of age for English-learning infants-suggesting that there are cross-linguistic differences in the onset of word comprehension. In addition, our study revealed that eight- to nine-month-old infants cannot rely exclusively on single extra-linguistic cues to disambiguate between two items, thus suggesting the existence of early word-object mappings. However, these mappings are weak, as infants need additional cues (such as an imbalance in frequency of word use) to reveal word recognition. Our results suggest that the very onset of word comprehension is not based on the infants' knowledge of words
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