S35MZ

Eva Rodríguez Cárdenas
only are infants sensitive to their internal transitional
probabilities of words in natural speech,
but they are also sensitive to both forward and
backward transitional probability. Of course,
these statistics alone do not provide sufficient
information for segmentation of natural speech,
but there are multiple cues to word boundaries
that converge of which sequential statistics are
relevant.
Some conclusions can be reached from
these articles. Children recognise the linguistic
form of a word before linking it to a referent in
the real world and, in order to separate these
linguistic forms when listening to continuous
speech by adults, they make use of different
cues. As an answer to the question of which
is more useful in word recognition, if isolated
words or complete utterances, one could state
that a combination of both is, if not necessary,
the best way to learn new words, because
there is a kind of symbiotic relation between
them and depending on the child’s abilities, he
will make use of one or the other. Furthermore,
thanks to the knowledge children already have
of their mother tongue, they are able to distinguish
words in speech paying attention to their
internal transitional probabilities and to other
phonotactic patterns.
Words, gestures and sounds
Early in development, infants begin to use symbols
to refer to objects, actions, and events in
the world. Words can serve as symbols and, although
language learning requires more complex
abilities than learning a simple symbol-toreferent
mapping, this distinction between language
acquisition and symbol development is
less clear at the point when infants first start to
produce words. This relationship between language
and symbols was studied by Namy and
Waxman (1998), who tested the hypothesis
that an early, general ability to learn symbols
gives rise to a more unique focus on words,
later in development. At 18 months, infants’ ini-
134 Esdrújula. Revista de filología
tial symbolic capacities are flexible enough to
accommodate both words and gestures, but in
contrast, 26-month-olds mapped only the novel
word to object categories. An explanation for
these results may be that older infants have acquired
an expectation that words but not gestures
are presented within a sentence context,
whereas the 18-month-olds have not yet developed
this expectation. So, this experiment
proves that in the initial stages of productive
symbol use, infants have an ability to map both
words and gestures to object categories and
that, as a spoken language develops, words
supplant gestures.
Another paper by the same authors continued
the first study some years later (Namy &
Waxman, 2002), this time to examine the hypothesis
that as infants acquire greater experience
with language, words begin to take on
a greater priority in the infant’s communicative
repertoire. Furthermore, they tested whether
the developmental trend in infants’ comprehension
of the novel arbitrary symbols employed
in their first experiment was mirrored
in their spontaneous production of the novel
symbols. The results did not differ much from
the previous ones, but a new conclusion could
be reached: at 1;6, gestures appear to function
as stand-alone symbols with the same
representational potential as words. However,
by 2;2, the function of gesture changes to an
argumentative form of communication used to
punctuate and amplify verbal communication
rather than to name.
The next step was to prove if babies could
also map non-linguistic sounds to objects as
well as words, and that is the aim of Woodward
and Hoyne (1999). They wondered whether babies
have further refined their expectations so
that they would accept only words in labelling
contexts, as happened with the older infants in
the previous papers (Namy & Waxman, 1998;
2002). The results were very similar: in communicative
contexts, younger infants are more
open-minded as learners than are older infants.