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