Now You Hear It: Fourteen-Month-Olds Succeed at Learning Minimal Pairs in Stressed Syllables

We examined whether 14-month-olds learn the mapping between a novel word and object in an associative-learning task when the forms differ minimally in only one segment where the crucial difference occurs in a stressed syllable. Fifty infants were presented with novel word–object pairings. Infants in one group heard the minimal difference in an initially stressed syllable, and the other group heard the minimal difference in a medially stressed syllable. Only those infants who were taught the medially stressed minimal pair detected a mismatch in the word–object pairing. These results demonstrate that 14-month-olds can succeed at minimal pair word learning when the critical information is presented in a stressed syllable, but importantly, only when particular acoustic cues are highlighted by syllable position—in this case, the medial position.