Early wordform recognition in Akan-learning infants

The emergence of early wordform recognition - the ability of infants to correctly identify or recognize auditorily a known word - is an important development in the language acquisition process. Findings from previous research on wordform recognition reveal that by 11 months, infants already show a preference for correctly pronounced familiar words over pseudowords, demonstrating sensitivity to and recognition of early familiar wordforms (French: Hallé & de Boysson-Bardies, 1994; Poltrock & Nazzi, 2005; English: Vihman, et al., 2004; Dutch: Swingley, 2005). While these prior studies bear on monolingual infants learning Indo-European languages, in the present study, we extend this research to understudied African languages and multilingual infants.