How much do babies really understand? Infants are constantly developing and acquiring knowledge and as they grow older, their brains become more and more powerful. Researchers believed infants initially obtain language-specific phonemes (word sounds), phoneme clusters and word prosody (the pattern of stress and pitch on words) then use what they have learned to gradually create memories of and connect meaning to these words. However, current research has shown that infants can begin to comprehend words as early as six to nine months. This suggests previous research may have been incorrect and that infants have the ability to learn the meaning of words at the same time they learn the sound structure of their language. However, before infants are able to acquire the meaning of words they must be able to categorize complex visual patterns, perceive information and detect regularities in words, which happens within their first months of living. Therefore, infants hold the potential to associate words with meaning before they reach six months old.

A study conducted by Friedrich & Friederici (2017) examined whether three-month-old infants had the ability to learn eight new objects and eight new words in experimental sessions of 7.5 minutes. To do so they used event related potentials (ERPs), which allowed them to measure the infants’ neural response for multiple necessary abilities including: creating representations of visual objects, recognizing the representation of word sounds mentally, creating a neural connection between word sounds and mental representations and retaining the connections between objects and words in the long-term memory. They presented each infant in their study with sixteen brightly coloured pictures of unknown objects and sixteen unknown words with two syllables each. A woman who spoke slowly and emphasized the first syllable of the word presented the words.

To distinguish if the infants had learned anything, researchers divided the experiment into two sections. The first section checked their familiarity of the words and the second section tested memory, one day after the first section. To check familiarity, infants were shown pairs of pictures and words using sixteen unknown objects and sixteen unknown words. For the first eight times (using consistent pairing), researchers presented the same object with the same word every time. For the remaining eight times (using inconsistent pairing), each of the eight words was paired with every one of the eight objects once. To test their memory, the consistent pairs were shown a total of fourteen times; seven were matched as they were initially and seven were incorrectly matched.

What they learned from this study was that three-month-old infants had the ability to form neural representations of new objects and new words, if they were repeatedly presented. In addition, they found that the associations did not remain in their long-term memory until the second day they were presented. By repeating the words and pictures,the infants were able to increase their processing abilities, which in turn made their memories stronger. This neurophysiological evidence suggests the brains of three-month-old children are powerful enough to create a neurological association between objects and words using the presented stimuli.

In conclusion, three-month old infants proved to have the ability to create relationships between words and pictures before they were able to learn authentic words. This shows that semantic ability in infants is higher than researchers previously thought and this is crucial knowledge for studying the development of children’s brains in the future.

Reference:

Friedrich, M., & Friederici, A. D. (2015). The origins of word learning: Brain responses of 3-month-olds indicate their rapid association of objects and words. Developmental Science, 20(2). doi:10.1111/desc.12357