S35MZ

Eva Rodríguez Cárdenas
sounds to a referent. That is, a word is the association
between the sound and the meaning.
Because of that, it is logical that some linguists
have found the phonetic aspect a relevant one
in word learning and have studied it closely.
Some years ago there seemed to be a paradox
in word learning because certain researches
had stated that infants appeared to be abstract
auditory or language processors whereas
toddlers appeared to be non-abstract, item-specific
language users. In order to describe a satisfactory
resolution for these contradictory findings,
Naigles (2002) proposed three resolutions,
being the third the only one relevant for this article.
It gives a simple answer: infancy studies assessed
generalizations only over form, whereas
toddler studies assessed generalizations over
form and meaning. So, the findings of toddlers’
“regression” from being able to abstract patterns
over linguistic stimuli as infants can be attributed
to their problems with meaning, not their
problems with abstract linguistic form. One can
realize from this explanation that infants learn
first the linguistic form and, afterwards, they relate
them to their meaning.
However, there are more questions to be
solved. For example, how do children recognise
single words in fluent speech? For a long
time, it had been assumed that children learnt
words because they heard them in isolation, but
some authors have suggested that children directed
speech (CDS) does not provide enough
isolated words so as to acquire their linguistic
form. In their paper, Brent and Siskind (2001)
revisit the potential role of isolated words in
early word learning. The subjects of the study
were 8 mothers and their children (from 9 to 15
months of age), being each mother-infant pair
recorded while they were alone in their home.
From their study, four main ideas rose. First, isolated
words occur regularly in the experience of
infants. Second, these isolated words comprise
a variety of distinct word types. Third, a significant
proportion of the first words produced by
infants are words typically spoken in isolation
132 Esdrújula. Revista de filología
by their mothers before they start to produce
them. Finally, if a mother speaks a given word in
isolation frequently, it is more probable that her
child will be able to use that word later.
From these results, Brent and Siskind (2001)
concluded that young children typically acquire
a small, initial vocabulary from exposure
to isolated words, but it does not mean that
isolated words are essential, just that it may explain
why children develop language so rapidly.
If this conclusion is true, then infants should
be more efficient in identifying an isolated word
than a word embedded in continuous speech.
That is why Fernald and Hurtado (2006) compared
the responses of 18-month-old infants to
the same words presented in isolation and in
a familiar sentence frame by using online eyetracking
methods, which provide continuous
measures of speed and accuracy that enable
more sensitive assessment of children’s efficiency
in interpreting the same word in different
contexts. The result was that infants were
significantly faster to respond to target words
in continuous speech than to target words in
isolation. This suggests that target word interpretation
was facilitated by the carrier phrase
on sentence-frame trials. Although it may seem
illogical, it is not; one has to take into account
that a word in isolation appears without warning,
whereas familiar frames may enable the
child to anticipate the occurrence of the upcoming
target noun. However, these findings
do not deny completely the conclusions of the
previous paper (Brent & Siskind, 2001), but
points out the importance of the use of short,
simple, repetitive carrier frames leading up to
a familiar noun, especially since this seems to
be a more advantageous habit that the one of
speaking words in isolation.
Words in isolation and frames within the utterances
are not the only cues that children use
when learning new words: an important factor
in language acquisition is infants’ knowledge of
native language sound patterns, as it is shown
in the paper by Estes, Edwards and Saffran