Infants’ early associations between segments of words and referents: Precursors of morphology acquisition

Antecedents and objective

During morphology acquisition, children must learn to segment and associate the morphemes of a word to its meaning or grammatical function, despite the complex morphological variability children may encounter in their linguistic environment. The present study explores the ability of 9–12-month-old infants to segment a morpheme-like syllable of varying pseudowords and associate it to a novel object.

Participants and method

Thirty-nine Spanish-learning infants participated in an experiment involving a preferential looking task. During each of five training trials per category, infants were presented to one of two novel objects while simultaneously heard two instances of pseudowords with a common morpheme-like segment either at the beginning or the end of the pseudoword (e.g., /tabi/, /babi/, for object 1; or /sato/, /same/, for object 2). Children were then tested in five trials per object. The two trained objects were presented side-by-side while infants heard new pseudowords that followed the pattern of the pseudowords that were heard during training.

Results

Results show an effective association between a referent and a group of pseudowords with a repeating morpheme-like segment. This association is observed both with beginning and final segments.

Conclusions

These findings show infants’ basic abilities for the processing of morphology at an earlier age than it has been suggested. The potential influence of morphologically rich languages such as Spanish is considered.