Infants’ Recognition of Vowel Contrasts in a Word Learning Task

At the end of the first year of life, there is a confluence of two major developments in infant language acquisition. Infants this age are emerging from a period of refining their speech perception skills to native-language contrasts (e.g., Werker & Tees, 1984). Concurrently, the infants’ word learning skills are solidifying. Although infants have some success with word learning prior to 12 months of age (Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999), the second year of life witnesses a veritable explosion of word comprehension and acquisition (e.g., Feldman, et al., 2000). The key question for the current paper is how speech perception cues influence the emergence of word learning, and vice-versa.