Early word comprehension in infants: Replication and extension

A handful of recent experimental reports have shown that infants of 6–9 months know the meanings of some common words. Here, we replicate and extend these findings. With a new set of items, we show that when young infants (age 6–16 months, n = 49) are presented with side-by-side video clips depicting various common early words, and one clip is named in a sentence, they look at the named video at above-chance rates. We demonstrate anew that infants understand common words by 6–9 months and that performance increases substantially around 14 months. The results imply that 6- to 9-month-olds’ failure to understand words not referring to objects (verbs, adjectives, performatives) in a similar prior study is not attributable to the use of dynamic video depictions. Thus, 6- to 9-month-olds’ experience of spoken language includes some understanding of common words for concrete objects, but relatively impoverished comprehension of other words.