Recognizing word forms is an important step on infants’ way toward mastering their native language. The present study takes a meta‐analytic approach to assess overarching questions on the literature of early word‐form recognition. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which there is cross‐linguistic evidence for an early recognition lexicon, and how it may be influenced by infant age, language background, and familiarity of the selected stimuli (approximated by parent‐reported word knowledge). Our meta‐analysis—with open data access on metalab.stanford.edu—was based on 32 experiments in 16 different published or unpublished studies on infants 5–15 months of age. We found an overall significant effect of word‐form familiarity on infants’ responses. This effect increased with age and was higher for infants learning Romance languages than other languages. We further found that younger, but not older, infants showed higher effect sizes for more familiar word lists. These insights should help researchers plan future studies on word‐form recognition.

中文翻译：

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婴儿词形识别的元分析

识别单词形式是婴儿掌握母语的重要一步。本研究采用元分析方法来评估有关早期词形识别文献的总体问题。具体而言，我们调查了早期识别词典的跨语言证据的程度，以及它如何受婴儿年龄、语言背景和所选刺激的熟悉程度（由父母报告的单词知识近似）影响。我们的荟萃分析——在 metalab.stanford.edu 上开放数据访问——基于 16 项不同的已发表或未发表的 5-15 个月婴儿研究中的 32 项实验。我们发现词形熟悉度对婴儿的反应有整体的显着影响。这种影响随着年龄的增长而增加，并且对于学习罗曼语语言的婴儿来说比其他语言更高。我们进一步发现，年龄较小但年龄较大的婴儿对更熟悉的单词列表显示出更高的效应量。这些见解应该有助于研究人员规划未来关于词形识别的研究。