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familiar objects with phonologically similar labels, supporting the view that
phonological representation is not necessarily ‘underspecified’
at this age (Gerken, Murphy & Aslin, 1995). Infants who learnt the novel
words also distinguished the objects with similar-sounding labels. However,
vocabulary size was not related to word learning or segmental representation
capacity, suggesting that segmental representation may help infants to learn words,
but this process is not driven by vocabulary growth (Metsala, 1999). We also report
a positive relationship between word learning ability and the frequency of
parents’ ostensive naming.
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