children are able to distinguish newly learned ‘words’ associated with objects if they are not similar-sounding, such as ‘lif’ and ‘neem’. they cannot distinguish similar-sounding newly learned words such as ‘bih’ and ‘dih’, however. so, while children at this age are able to distinguish monosyllabic minimal pairs at a purely phonological level, if the discrimination task is paired with word meaning, the additional cognitive load required by learning the word meanings leaves them unable to spend the extra effort on distinguishing the similar phonology.