In considering this direction of influence, we are not arguing that rich vocabulary knowledge is the sole driver of phonotactic representations because by 9 months of age infants distinguish phonotactically legal versus illegal sequences and common versus rare sequences At these ages, infants have started to store representations of word forms and have started to comprehend words, but they do not yet have rich lexicons. The average comprehension vocabulary size is only approximately 40 words at 9 months of age. However, the presence of early phonotactic sensitivities in infants also does not mean that phonotactic representations are fully formed during infancy. Although early representations of native phonotactics may be an important foundation for word segmentation and word learning, there is ample room for further enrichment as vocabulary acquisition promotes the strengthening of phonotactic representations and phonological representations more broadly.