Making sense of infant familiarity and novelty responses to words at lexical onset

TY - JOUR

T1 - Making sense of infant familiarity and novelty responses to words at lexical onset

AU - DePaolis, Rory

AU - Keren-Portnoy, Tamar

AU - Vihman, Marilyn

N1 - © 2016, DePaolis, Keren-Portnoy and Vihman. This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permission.

PY - 2016/5/18

Y1 - 2016/5/18

N2 - This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: Familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants), novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar) and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words). The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed no-preference. The results provide partial support for Hunter and Ames' (1988) developmental model of attention in infancy and suggest caution when interpreting studies indexed to chronological age.

AB - This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: Familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants), novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar) and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words). The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed no-preference. The results provide partial support for Hunter and Ames' (1988) developmental model of attention in infancy and suggest caution when interpreting studies indexed to chronological age.

KW - Early word learning

KW - Familiarity

KW - Headturn preference procedure

KW - Infant speech perception

KW - Novelty

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84974661311&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00715

DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00715

M3 - Article

SN - 1664-1078

VL - 7

JO - Frontiers in Psychology

JF - Frontiers in Psychology

M1 - 715

ER -