General discussion
The results of the current experiments indicate that infants can use learning about native language
sound patterns to feed word learning. Experiment 1 established a set of labels and objects that 14-
month-olds find difficult to associate when the learning environment lacks supplemental support.
Experiment 2 used the same labels and objects but provided additional cues for building phonological
representations of the labels. When infants heard target words embedded in sentences that contained
good phonotactic word boundary cues, they successfully learned the target words as object labels.
When infants heard the same target words embedded with poor phonotactic segmentation cues, they
did not display any evidence of learning the labels. Simple exposure to the words in fluent speech passages
was not sufficient to promote label learning. Across cue conditions, infants heard the target
words the same number of times. However, infants required the presence of language-specific word
boundary cues to use the experience with listening to the word forms to facilitate object label learning.