Marno, H. 1 , Farroni, T. 2 & Mehler, J. 1
1 Language, Cognition and Development Lab, SISSA, Trieste, Italy
2 DPSS, Universita degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy
Human language is a special auditory stimulus and infants immediately after their birth are equipped to acquire it in a very fast way. Indeed, there is evidence that already newborns are able to distinguish languages they never heard before, based on their rhythmical characteristics (Mehler et al., 1988; Nazzi et al., 1998; Ramus et al., 1999, 2000), to detect acoustic cues that signal word boundaries (Christophe et al., 1994), to discriminate words based on their patterns of lexical stress (Sansavini et al., 1997) and to distinguish content words from function words by detecting their different acoustic characteristics (Shi et al., 1999). Moreover, they are also able to recognize words with the same vowels after a 2 min delay (Benavides-Varela et al., 2012). In sum, there is great evidence that infants are born with a unique sensitivity to process language, but from when they start to understand that language is a referential symbol system and that words refer to entities in the world, is still unknown. In the present study we addressed this questions. Fifteen, 4-months old infants were shown videos of a female face, who was either talking in a normal way, or in a backward way, or she was silently moving her lips. After each movie the face disappeared and either on the left side or on the right side of the screen an object appeared. Preliminary results showed that infants? looked faster at the object in the normal speech condition than in the backward speech and silent condition. Thus, these results support the hypothesis that infants do not only possess great speech-processing abilities, but they also have referential expectations about language, and in the presence of speech they are ready to search for possible referents, at least from 4 months age old.