It is believed that infants start learning words at an age between 9 and 15 months. However, a recent study shows that this theory about the developmental stages of language learning for babies is actually quite flawed. This new study finds that infants already recognize several common nouns for foods and body parts, at least in a budding sense, as early as 6-month-old.
10-month-old participates in a word-recognition experiment. Credit: E. Bergelson
Graduate student Elika Bergelson and psychologist Daniel Swingley of the Unversity of Pennsylvania say that while babies usually utter their first word at the around 1 year of age, but babies can catch words as early as 6 months of age. They found that these infants eyes lingered longer at images of certain foods or body parts after the mother has mentioned these certain words.
Experimental Setup. Credit: E. Bergelson and D. Swingley
In their present research, Bergelson and Swingley examined 33 infants ranging from 6 to 9 month-old, as well as 50 children ranging in age from 10 to 20 months. This kids participated in a word-recognition experiment whereby they sat down on their mother’s lap in front of a computer connected to an eye-tracking device. The mothers wore visor and headphones while repeating the prerecorded sentences they heard to their child. These sentences were formatted such as “Can you find the nose?” or “Look at the banana!”. It was detected that when flashed with a picture with two different things on the screen, kids as young as 6 months looked at picture of banana, for example, longer than at the nose when the mother mentions the word “banana.” And vice versa.
Bergelson and Swingley said that mothers in the study did not realize that their 6-month-olds were already able to recognize food and body-part words. Although babies show signs of recognizing words like “mommy”, “daddy” and other frequently heard words at those ages, we should not be mistaken into believing that these babies understand what these words mean.
From Getty Images, WebMD slideshow
In my opinion, studies like these are important and it is a good idea to educate parents about this information relating to their kids. That way they will have an idea on how to bring up, nurture and respond to their infants at certain ages.
Video below briefly shows how the eye-tracking in infants work.
For full article of the study: here
For review post by Bruce Bower: here
