The current research investigated how infants apply prior
knowledge of environmental regularities to support new learning.
The experiments tested whether infants could exploit experience
with native language (English) phonotactic patterns to facilitate
associating sounds with meanings during word learning. Infants
(14-month-olds) heard fluent speech that contained cues for
detecting target words; the target words were embedded in
sequences that occur across word boundaries. A separate group
heard the target words embedded without word boundary cues.
Infants then participated in an object label learning task. With
the opportunity to use native language patterns to segment the
target words, infants subsequently learned the labels. Without this
experience, infants failed. Novice word learners can take advantage
of early learning about sounds to scaffold lexical development.