CNL Lunch Talks

Rochelle Newman & Nan Bernstein-Ratner (HESP)

Infant perception skills and later

language development

Thursday April 8th, 2004, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Young infants demonstrate a remarkable ability to acquire language, and recent years have seen a large number of studies that examine the perceptual abilities that might underly this rapid pace of acquisition. Yet most of these studies have simply reported on skills evidenced by the majority of infants tested; few studies have directly examined the relationship between these skills and language acquisition within individual participants, or whether infants who succeed in these infant tasks differ in language acquisition from those who do not.

In this study, we examined whether infants' perceptual performance predicted their long-term language development. Our participants were a group of 119 infants who had participated in a series of laboratory studies between five and 12 months of age . We first examined whether children's vocabulary at 24 months was related to their prior performance in the laboratory. It was - but only for some of the infant language tasks. We then followed a subset of these same children, and assessed their language and cognitive abilities at age 4-6 years. We found that children who had been successful in infant segmentation tasks scored significantly higher than those who had been unsuccessful as infants on all language measures; differences between the groups were not found for general measures of intelligence or attention.

These results strengthen models that view speech segmentation ability as an important prerequisite for timely and successful language development, and offer potential for the development of measures to detect specific language impairment at an earlier age.