An amodal study of phonological abstraction in early infancy

Adults learn non-native phonological contrasts faster if they experience the stimulus language in their first postnatal 6 months than if they never experienced it [1]. The resulting implication that young infants engage in phonological abstraction was examined here. We trained infants to associate words from two artificial mini-languages distinguished by consonant place (labial vs coronal), presented to two subgroups either as audio-only speech (A) or video-only speech (V) followed by different animal images for each of the two mini-languages. In Test, novel words of each mini-language were presented in the opposite modality to Training (A→V or V→A), followed by either the Congruent (trained) or the Incongruent (opposite mini-language) animal. The A→V mode infants attended longer to Congruent than Incongruent Test trials, but the V→A infants did not. Thus, infants show (i) phonological abstraction of the labial vs coronal distinction, (ii) in a cross-modal task, (iii) but only for A→V transfer.