Toward Establishing Continuity in Linguistic Skills Within Early Infancy

Bibliographic Data

ID4501694
AuthorsAmanda Seidl (0000-0001-9825-1462, Purdue University, corresponding author), Brian French (0000-0002-6173-5321, Washington State University), Brian F French (0000-0002-3896-7888, Washington State University), Yuanyuan Wang (0000-0001-8181-3465, Purdue University), Alejandrina Cristia (0000-0003-2979-4556, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique CNRS IEC‐ENS EHESS)
Year2014
Volume64
Issues2
Pages165-183
Publication date2014-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage Learning (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0023-8333 • E-ISSN: 1467-9922
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/lang.12059
OpenAlexW2154737430
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited34

A growing research line documents significant bivariate correlations between individual measures of speech perception gathered in infancy and concurrent or later vocabulary size. One interpretation of this correlation is that it reflects language specificity: Both speech perception tasks and the development of the vocabulary recruit the same linguistic modules. However, correlations between infant cognitive measures (such as visual recognition memory) and vocabulary are also significant and display comparable strength. Can all of these correlations be reduced to extremely general rather than specific factors affecting performance in all laboratory tests? We take a first step in addressing this possibility by estimating the covariance matrix among two speech tasks (preference for the predominant stress pattern and native vowel discrimination) and two cognitive tasks (visual recognition memory and A-not-B), all of them gathered in the same group of infants tested between 5 and 8 months of age. Only the correlation between the two speech tasks was significant, lending little support to the generalist explanation. These data illustrate how a multivariate approach may inform our understanding of how infants build language in the first year of life and beyond. Future multivariate work following up on the same infants longitudinally will be better able to tease apart cognitive and linguistic contributions to vocabulary development

Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Correlation · Developmental psychology · Language development · Linguistics · Perception · Psycholinguistics · Speech perception · Vocabulary · Vowel · Child and Animal Learning Development · Language Development and Disorders · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development