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Significance Infants learn mappings between heard names and seen things before their first birthday and before they produce spoken language. Two challenges to explaining this early learning are the immaturity… Click to show full abstract
Significance Infants learn mappings between heard names and seen things before their first birthday and before they produce spoken language. Two challenges to explaining this early learning are the immaturity of infant memory systems and the infrequency of any individual object name in the heard language input. We quantified the frequency of visual referents, heard names, and the cooccurrences of referents and names in infant everyday experiences. We discovered statistical patterns at two timescales that align with a cortical mechanism of associative memory formation that supports the rapid formation of durable associative memories from very few experienced cooccurrences.
Journal Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year Published: 2022
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