Phonological representation in English-learning infants' word comprehension.

Infants begin understanding words within their first year, but few studies have investigated how accurately infants this young represent words' phonological forms during comprehension. This study tested English-learning infants aged 6-8, 9-11, and 12-14 months in an internet-based language-guided-looking task probing recognition of correct pronunciations and initial-consonant mispronunciations of words (n = 97; 48% female; 80% White, 10% Black, 5% multiracial, 4% Asian; Mage = 10.4 months; tested 2021-2023). The two older groups recognized correct pronunciations. Mispronunciation reduced target fixation in 9- to 11-month olds, an effect that was nonsignificant (p = .057) when including all items but significant for items with balanced salience (odds ratio = 1.51). Twelve- to 14-month olds consistently fixated targets less when hearing mispronunciations (odds ratio = 1.59). These findings set a lower bound on how vague early word representations could be and are consistent with phonologically accurate encoding of at least some words before the first birthday. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).