An eye-tracking device, which can distinguish precisely where a child is looking and when, then followed the child’s gaze. The caregiver also wore a visor to avoid seeing the screen. The caregiver wore headphones and heard a statement such as, “Look at the apple,” or, “Where’s the apple?” and then repeated it to the child. In the first, a child sat on the caregiver’s lap facing a screen on which there were images of one food item and one body part. To test this belief, Bergelson and Swingley recruited caregivers to bring their children to a lab to complete two different kinds of test. The belief that infants do not comprehend language for most of the first year is easy to understand, given that infants do not often speak in words, or even gesture meaningfully, before 10 or 11 months. But there have been few attempts to determine just when infants begin understanding what is meant by specific words. In fact, infants are often referred to as “pre-linguistic,” according to Bergelson. Most psychologists believed word comprehension didn’t emerge until closer to a child’s first birthday. It was widely believed that infants between 6 and 9 months, while able to perceive and understand elements of the sounds of their native language, did not yet possess the ability to grasp the meanings conveyed though speech. These findings unseat a previously held consensus about infant learning. Their study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
In research focused on 6-to-9-month-old babies, University of Pennsylvania psychologists Elika Bergelson and Daniel Swingley demonstrated that the infants learned the meanings of words for foods and body parts through their daily experience with language.īergelson is a doctoral student and Swingley an associate professor in Penn’s Department of Psychology.
PHILADELPHIA - At an age when “ba-ba” and “da-da” may be their only utterances, infants nevertheless comprehend words for many common objects, according to a new study.
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