Six-Month-Olds Comprehend Words That Refer to Parts of the Body

Comprehending spoken words requires a lexicon of sound patterns and knowledge of their referents in the world. Tincoff and Jusczyk (1999) demonstrated that 6-month-olds link the sound patterns Mommy and Daddy to video images of their parents, but not to other adults. This finding suggests that comprehension emerges at this young age and might take the form of very specific word-world links, as in Mommy referring only to the infants mother and Daddy referring only to the infants father. The current study was designed to investigate if 6-month-olds also show evidence of comprehending words that can refer to categories of objects. The results show that 6-month-olds link the sound patterns hand and feet to videos of an adults hand and feet. This finding suggests that very early comprehension has a capacity beyond specific, one-to-one, associations. Future research will need to consider how developing categorization abilities, social experiences, and parent word use influence the beginnings of word comprehension.