Dr. Suzanne Curtin, University of Calgary presents.

Learning about words is one of the key building blocks of language acquisition. To learn a new word, infants begin by identifying the relevant sound pattern in the speech stream. Next, they encode a sound representation of the word, and then establish a mapping between the word and a referent in the environment. Despite the apparent complexity of this task, infants move from a productive vocabulary of about 6 words at 12 months to a vocabulary of over 300 words by 24 months. In this talk I will discuss some of the ways in which young infants use the phonological information in the speech signal to map words to meaning. Specifically, I will present research exploring how knowledge of the sound system established over the first year of life influences infants’ mapping of words to objects and events. All are welcome.