Escudero, P. 1 , Nguyen, B. 2 , Gillespie-Lynch, K. 3, 2 & Johnson, S. P. 2
1 MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney
2 Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
3 College of Staten Island, City University of New York
Research has demonstrated that, before 17 months of age, children have substantial difficulty in learning to associate novel words to their picture referents when the novel words form phonologically minimal pairs, i.e., when they differ in a single consonant (e.g. 'bin'-'din'). It has also been shown that children under 17 months can associate objects' referents to some novel minimal pairs involving vowels, namely 'deet'-'dit', suggesting that the difficulty depends on the type of phoneme contrast presented to the learner. Yet other studies show that 14-month-olds can successfully learn minimal pairs if words are presented in clear sentential contexts and word reference via verbal cues is given during learning, demonstrating that the apparent difficulty is only found when the referential status of the novel word is unclear. We examined whether early word learning of minimal pairs can be aided by non-verbal cues, i.e., eye-gaze direction to the referent during word naming. During training, twenty-two 15- and 17-month-olds (N = 11 per group) saw twelve videos with two novel objects on a table and a model naming one of the objects while directing her gaze at it. In each video, one of four novel words ('bon', 'don', 'deet' and 'dit') was named. Testing trials presented two repetitions of one of the spoken words together with its referent next to that of another word. A repeated-measures ANOVA with Word as within-subject factor and Age-Group as between-subjects factor revealed a main effect of Word, with longer looks at the target referent for 'bon' and 'don' but not for 'deet' and 'dit'. No effect of Age-Group was found. We will discuss the implications of our findings for the effect of non-verbal cues on early word learning and for the debate on the differential role of consonants and vowels in lexical processing and its development.