Language Skills of 11 Month Old

One of our unique traits as human beings is the complexity of our communication. The forms and processes of communication vary between the different cultures and societies that make up our species, but our recognition and use of the spoken word is arguably the most important. Once the skill is learned, language is an important tool in one’s life until the day that they die. But when do those early building blocks of language start to take hold? To get a better understanding of the familiarization of word sounds in 11 month olds, five experiments were conducted by Daniel Swingley of the Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, and The Max-Planke-Institute, The Netherlands.

The five experiments were actually 3 different experiments, with two of the experiments being broken down into two different test. In the first experiment, the subjects were tested to see if they preferred familiar words over unfamiliar words, and this was used as a base for the other two experiments. The second experiment consisted of mispronouncing of onset, also known as the first syllable, of the familiar words from experiment one. The offset, or last syllable of a word, was mispronounced in the third experiment.

In the experiments, the subjects were played words that were deemed either easily recognizable or unfamiliar by the average 11 month old. The reaction of the children to the words was measured using the headturn preference procedure. The child was seated on their parent’s lap in a cubicle, and the experimenter initially got the child’s attention with a green LED light. Once they had their attention, the green light turned off and two flashing red LED lights came on. As the child fixated on one of these lights, the experimenter played the words in random order. Once the child lost fixation on the red light, the experimenter stopped the words and regained the child’s attention with said green light. This continued until all the words were completed and then each child was given an average time they looked at the red light.

As stated, in the first experiment the children were randomly played familiar and unfamiliar Dutch words. The experiments consisted of 12 boys and 12 girls. The results showed that the children overwhelmingly showed a preference for the familiar words, as the average listening time was 9.20 seconds for the familiar words compared to 7.39 seconds for the unfamiliar words. I think this makes sense, because we as humans tend to stick to what is familiar, whether it is a favorite toy as a child or the food we eat as an adult.

The second experiment was divided into 2a and 2b. In 2a, the children were exposed to said unfamiliar words and to the familiar words where the onset is mispronounced. The results show a preference for the unfamiliar words, 9.65 seconds, to the mispronounced words, 9.01 seconds. I find this to be not surprising, as any mispronounced word would come off