Young Infants' Retention of Information About Bisyllabic Utterances

This study examined 2- to 3-month-olds' representations of bisyllables. In 3 experiments, infants were familiarized with sets of bisyllables that either did or did not share a common consonant-vowel (CV) syllable. In Experiment 1, infants detected the presence of a new bisyllable in the test phase except when it shared a common initial CV syllable. A modified version of the high-amplitude sucking (HAS) procedure, incorporating a 2-min delay period, tested infants' retention of information about bisyllables in the remaining 2 experiments. In Experiment 2, infants were significantly more likely to retain information about bisyllables that shared the same initial CV syllable. Finally, the authors investigated whether infants simply benefited from the presence of 2 common phonetic segments, regardless of whether these came from the same CV syllable. The results showed that CV syllable organization is important in infants' ability to encode and retain information about bisyllables.