Toddlers’ novel word learning: Effects of phonological representation, vocabulary size and parents’ ostensive behaviour

We explore factors affecting word learning: phonological representation, vocabulary size and the frequency with which parents name objects for their children. Infants at 16–20 months were taught two novel words using preferential looking; they showed reliable learning of these words and reliably distinguished between familiar objects with phonologically similar labels, supporting the view that phonological representation is not necessarily ‘underspecified’ at this age (Gerken, Murphy & Aslin, 1995). Infants who learnt the novel words also distinguished the objects with similar-sounding labels. However, vocabulary size was not related to word learning or segmental representation capacity, suggesting that segmental representation may help infants to learn words, but this process is not driven by vocabulary growth (Metsala, 1999). We also report a positive relationship between word learning ability and the frequency of parents’ ostensive naming.