Familiar words capture the attention of 11-month-olds in less than 250 ms.

The capacity of human infants to discriminate contrasting speech sounds specializes to the native language by the end of the first year of life, when the first signs of word recognition have also been found, using behavioural measures. The extent of voluntary attentional involvement in such word recognition has not been explored, however, nor do we know what its neural time-course may be. Here we demonstrate that 11-month-old children shift their attention automatically to familiar words within 250 ms of presentation onset by measuring event-related potentials elicited by familiar and unfamiliar words. A significant modulation of the first negative peak (N200), known to index implicit change detection in adults, was induced by word familiarity in the infants.