Abstract
The maternal voice appears to have a special role in infants’ language processing. The current eye-tracking study investigated whether 24-month-olds (n = 149) learn novel words easier while listening to their mother's voice compared to hearing unfamiliar speakers. Our results show that maternal speech facilitates the formation of new word–object mappings across two different learning settings: a live setting in which infants are taught by their own mother or the experimenter, and a prerecorded setting in which infants hear the voice of either their own or another mother through loudspeakers. Furthermore, this study explored whether infants’ pointing gestures and novel word productions over the course of the word learning task serve as meaningful indexes of word learning behavior. Infants who repeated more target words also showed a larger learning effect in their looking behavior. Thus, maternal speech and infants’ willingness to repeat novel words are positively linked with novel word learning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 838-856 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Infancy |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:); and Nicole Altvater‐Mackensen for feedback. We also express thanks to Donna de Visser, Lisa van der Tier, and Fleur Vissers for their help in the data analyses. This research was supported in part by a VENI grant (016.154.051) from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded to author CJ. The authors declare no conflicts of interest with regard to the funding source for this study. We thank all infants and their parents who participated for making this study possible; Roberta Golinkoff and Derek Houston for kindly providing us with the stimuli as used by Ma et al. (
Publisher Copyright:
© International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS)
Funding
); and Nicole Altvater‐Mackensen for feedback. We also express thanks to Donna de Visser, Lisa van der Tier, and Fleur Vissers for their help in the data analyses. This research was supported in part by a VENI grant (016.154.051) from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded to author CJ. The authors declare no conflicts of interest with regard to the funding source for this study. We thank all infants and their parents who participated for making this study possible; Roberta Golinkoff and Derek Houston for kindly providing us with the stimuli as used by Ma et al. (