Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

Isolated words in input to infants: How important are they?

Presentation by Tamar Keren-Portnoy, The University of York

Many researchers assume that infants learn their first word forms from listening to long stretches of speech spoken to them or around them, and identifying possible ‘units’ in it. In a series of studies we show that this is unlikely, and that the first word forms that infants recognise are more likely to have been words heard in isolation, and not as part of sentences.

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