The present study explored the origins of word learning in early infancy. Using event-related potentials (ERP) we monitored the brain activity of 3-month-old infants when they were repeatedly exposed to several initially novel words paired consistently with each the same initially novel objects or inconsistently with different objects. Our results…

Joint attention develops during the first year of life but little is known about its effects on long-term memory. We investigated whether joint attention modulates long-term memory in 9-month-old infants. Infants were familiarized with visually presented objects in either of two conditions that differed in the degree of joint attention (high…

We show that infants' long-term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo- and timbre-specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants…