Intersensory Redundancy and Seven-Month-Old Infants' Memory for Arbitrary Syllable-Object Relations.

Seven-month-old infants require redundant information such as temporal synchrony to learn arbitrary syllable-object relations. Infants learned the relations between spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and two moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. Two experiments examined infants' memory for these relations. In Experiment 1, infants remembered the syllable-object relations after 10 minutes, only when temporal synchrony between the vocalizations and moving objects was provided during learning. In Experiment 2, seven-month-olds were habituated to the same syllable-object pairs in the presence of temporal synchrony and tested for memory after 4 days. Once again, infants learned and showed emerging memory for the syllable-object relations 4 days after original learning. These findings are consistent with the view that prior to symbolic development infants learn and remember word-object relations by perceiving redundant information in the vocal and gestural communication of adults. (Contains 29 references.) (Author)