12‐Month‐Olds’ Phonotactic Knowledge Guides Their Word–Object Mappings

Abstract

This study examined whether 12-month-olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word-object (N = 30), Japanese word-object (N = 15), or Czech word-object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated. Infants associated CVCV English, CCVC English, and CVCV Japanese words, but not CCVC Czech words, with novel objects. These results demonstrate that by 12 months of age, infants are beginning to apply their language-specific knowledge to their acceptance of word forms. That is, they will not map words that violate the phonotactics of their native language to objects.

Learning about sounds contributes to learning about words: Effects of prosody and phonotactics on infant word learning

“…Infants readily learned novel object labels that consisted of legal phoneme combinations in English, but failed to learn labels that contained illegal phoneme combinations. MacKenzie, Curtin, and Graham (2012) also found that 12-month-olds failed to learn phonotactically illegal object labels. Later in development, a similar pattern is apparent for labels that are phonotactically legal, but differ in probability.…”

“…Infants’ ability to discriminate sound sequences does not necessarily indicate that they treat them as functionally distinct (e.g., Stager & Werker, 1997). However infants do differentiate phonotactically legal versus illegal object labels (Graf Estes et al, 2011; MacKenzie et al, 2012) and may do the same for high versus low phonotactic probability labels. Finally, how do prosodic and phonotactic regularities interact in word learning?…”

“…Accordingly, we predicted that high phonotactic probability labels would be easier to learn than low probability labels. Alternatively, infants may only distinguish legal versus illegal phoneme combinations in new words (Graf Estes et al, 2011; MacKenzie et al, 2012), and may not make the more precise distinction between legal labels differing in probability. This experiment also addressed whether there is a trochaic bias for learning object labels.…”

Nine-month-olds use frequency of onset clusters to segment novel words

“…By 12 months, English-learning infants are able to attach phonotactically legal words to novel objects, but not illegal words (MacKenzie et al, 2012;see Graf-Estes et al, 2010 for similar results at 18 months). By tracking highly probable combinations of speech sounds, infants can recognize these forms as good word candidates.…”

“…Twelve-month-olds map novel words containing legal onsets onto objects (e.g., plot), but not those that contain illegal ones (e.g., ptak; MacKenzie, Curtin, & Graham, 2012).…”