Intersensory redundancy facilitates learning of arbitrary relations between vowel sounds and objects in seven-month-old infants (original) (raw)

This study investigated 7-month-old infants' ability to relate vowel sounds with objects when intersensory redundancy was present versus absent. Infants (N = 48) were habituated to two alternating video-films of vowel-object pairs in one of three conditions. In the moving-synchronous condition, where redundancy was present, the movement of one object was temporally coordinated with the spoken vowel Ial and that of the other with Ii!, simulating showing and naming the objects to the infant. In the still and in the movingasynchronous conditions, where redundancy was absent, infants saw static objects, and objects moving out of synchrony with the vowel sounds, respectively. The results indicated that infants detected a mismatch in the vowel-object pairs in the movingsynchronous condition but not in the still or the moving-asynchronous condition. These findings demonstrate that temporal synchrony between vocalizations and the motions of an object facilitates learning of arbitrary speech-object relations, an important precursor to the development of lexical comprehension in infancy.

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