| The present research has two specific aims. Firstly, it inquires into the role of phonologically similar words in object individuation. Secondly, it tests whether 9-month-old infants, who succeed in individuating objects with the help of word labels, can already encode specific word-object associations after brief exposure. To explore the first aim, we used a very close adaptation of Xu's individuation method (1998, 2002) and for the second aim, we employed an adaptation of a preferential looking method (Swingley & Aslin, 2000). Our results support the following two conclusions: (1) Pairing two words that differ in a minimal amount of phonetic detail with two different objects in an individuation task produces the same results as pairing the two objects with the same word. (2) Although, in a Xu-type individuation experiment, the brief exposure to two word-object pairings facilitated 9-month-old infants' success in processing the two objects as different entities, this does not necessarily lead to a robust encoding of the specific word-object associations (even when the words are markedly different). Together, the results we obtained strengthened our belief that 9-month-old infants are at an interesting point of transition between processing speech as just sound, and learning to relate speech units (words) to entities in the world. Further research directions are discussed. |
