Beneficial effects of the mother’s voice on infants’ novel word learning

Abstract

For language acquisition, the maternal voice is special as it is the voice infants are most familiar with. The current eye-tracking study investigated whether 24-month-olds (n =149) learn novel words easier while listening to their mothers compared to unfamiliar speakers. Results show that maternal speech facilitates the formation of new word-object mappings across two different settings: a live setting in which an infant is actively taught by the infant’s mother or the experimenter, and a prerecorded setting in which the voice of either the infant’s own or another infant’s mother is played over loudspeakers.