Intersensory Redundancy and 7-Month-Old Infants’ Memory for Arbitrary Syllable–Object Relations
Lakshmi J. Gogate
Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York at Brooklyn
Lorraine E. Bahrick
Department of Psychology, Florida International University

Seven-month-old infants require redundant information, such as temporal synchrony, to learn arbitrary syllable–object relations (Gogate & Bahrick, 1998). Infants learned the relations between 2 spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and 2 moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. This article presents 2 experiments to address infants’ memory for these relations. In Experiment 1, infants remembered the syllable–object relations after 10 min, only when temporal synchrony between the vocalizations and moving objects was provided during learning. In Experiment 2, 7-month-olds were habituated to the same syllable–object pairs in the presence of temporal synchrony and tested for memory after 4 days. Once again, infants learned and showed emerging memory for the syllable–object relations 4 days after original learning under the temporally synchronous condition. These findings are consistent with the view that prior to symbolic development, infants learn and remember word–object relations by perceiving redundant information in the vocal and gestural communication of adults.