Experiments
Infants of this age were taught 2 similar sounding labels in Experiment 1.
14 months old
Infants saw the pairings repeatedly until looking time decreased below a threshold. This phase is called this.
Habituation
In Experiment 2, only infants of this age noticed the switch.
8 months old
These 2 nonsense syllables, also called minimal pairs, were the "phonetically similar" labels.
bih and dih
A longer look at this kind of trial, where the word-object pairing is changed, showed that the infants noticed.
The switch trial
The authors suggest 8 month olds pass the single-pair task because for them it's this, not word learning
Simple sound discrimination task.
A checkerboard pattern
To avoid biasing the infants, researchers used these 3 things on the parents.
A hat with a visor, a cloth blind, and had headphones on listening to female vocal music.
Authors used this term for the shift in how infants use phonetic detail, associating it to the earlier decline in non-native phone discrimination
functional reorganization
Experiment 3 used lif and neem as this kind of experiment, to show that Experiment 2's failure was due to phonetic similarity and not other task factors.
A control
A checkerboard image was used in Experiment 4 for this reason.
Infants are unlikely to perceive an unbounded stationary display as an object, and therefore unlikely to label it.
That 14 month old's can no longer make fine phonetic discriminations.