In conclusion, this research presents a means of connecting how infants’ early learning about sounds
contributes to the process of associating sounds with meanings during word learning. Infants readily
learned object labels supported by their prior knowledge of native language phonotactic and prosodic
patterns. They failed to learn object labels that did not provide support on both dimensions, consisting
of uncommon phonemes and stress patterns. New words that are consistent with the phonotactic and
prosodic regularities that infants have spent months gathering may be easier to associate with referents
because they are built from robust phonological representations (see Beckman & Edwards, 2000; Edwards
et al., 2004; Werker & Curtin, 2005). Infants have practice in perceiving, segmenting, and recognizing
these sounds, so they can be accessed in new lexical items more effectively and flexibly than
sound sequences that do not possess this basis in prior learning. Our findings reveal one way in which
statistical learning about native language sound structure lays a foundation for lexical development