Infants’ developing lexicon

During the first year of life, infants develop word segmentation capacities and start storing segmented word candidates in a ‘protolexicon’. Previously, we showed that their sensitivity to statistical information leads them to include in this protolexicon frequently occurring non-word strings in addition to real words. Indeed, we found that 11-month-old French-learning infants recognize frequently occurring strings regardless of whether they are words (e.g., gateau ‘cake’, chaussure ‘shoe’) or non-words (e.g., dans la ‘in the’, va faire ‘will do’, … ), while they do not recognize disyllabic non-word strings that rarely occur in their input (e.g., *dalans, *vaifare, …). In this study, we will experimentally test the prediction that infants initially consider all items in their protolexicon to be real words that should be mapped onto a meaning. The student should have an interest in language acquisition but a background in (psycho-)linguistics is not required. A working knowledge of French is necessary to interact with infants and their parents.