This means that minor details on the surface of objects are not something that infants at 12 months may reliably

use to individuate objects. Nevertheless, if a feature is pointed to them, then it helps them keep track of the referent across multiple contexts and time periods. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that infants’ understanding of an object’s identity as they encounter it in multiple contexts affects their comprehension of references to that object when absent. When infants saw an object in two different locations providing them with identifying information, but not other kind of information, helped them respond to absent reference by locating the object. This finding highlights the relationship between early cognitive and language development: The way infants perceive and conceptualize objects and space affects their selleck products comprehension of speech about the absent. We thank all families who participated. We also thank Amy Needham and Daniel Levin

for helpful advice. We thank Maria Vázquez, Hannah Suchy, Michelle Doscas, and Bronwyn Backstrom for their help with data collection and coding. “
“It is well attested that 14-month-olds have difficulty learning similar sounding words (e.g., bih/dih), despite their excellent phonetic discrimination abilities. By contrast, Rost Fer-1 solubility dmso and McMurray (2009) recently demonstrated that 14-month-olds’ minimal-pair learning can be improved by the presentation of words by multiple talkers. This study investigates which components of the variability found in multitalker input improved infants’ processing, assessing

both the phonologically contrastive aspects of the Meloxicam speech stream and phonologically irrelevant indexical and suprasegmental aspects. In the first two experiments, speaker was held constant while cues to word-initial voicing were systematically manipulated. Infants failed in both cases. The third experiment introduced variability in speaker, but voicing cues were invariant within each category. Infants in this condition learned the words. We conclude that aspects of the speech signal that have been typically thought of as noise are in fact valuable information—signal—for the young word learner. Research in early language acquisition has been peppered with findings that very young infants have excellent abilities to discriminate speech categories (e.g., Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971; Werker & Tees, 1984; for a review, see Werker & Curtin, 2005). However, Stager and Werker (1997) (for a review, see Werker & Fennell, 2006) reported that for somewhat older infants (14-month-olds), some of these abilities appear to be ineffective when applied to word learning.