Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined whether infants between 11 and 12 months (N = 36) distinguish between three-word sequences (trigrams) with similar substring frequencies but different multiword frequency in infant-directed speech (e.g., high frequency: ‘clap your hands’ vs. low frequency: ‘take your hands’). Infants looked significantly longer at frequent trigrams compared to infrequent ones. This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development.

尽管单词通常被描述为语言的基本组成部分，但是越来越多的证据表明，多单词序列在语言学习和处理中也起着不可或缺的作用。然而，尚不清楚在儿童仍在建立各个单词的知识的年龄时，他们是否对多单词信息变得敏感。本研究使用集中注视范式，研究了11个月至12个月（N  = 36）之间的婴儿是否区分婴儿定向语音中具有相似子串频率但具有不同多字频率的三个单词序列（三语）（例如，高频：“拍手”与低频：“握手”）。与不常用的字母相比，常用的三字词的婴儿长得多。这提供了第一个证据，即单字产生的婴儿已经对多字序列的频率敏感，并建议他们从早期就代表各种大小的语言单元，从而增加了评估单词和较大序列知识的需求在开发过程中。