A Cross‐linguistic Examination of Toddlers’ Interpretation of Vowel Duration

Abstract

Languages differ in their phonological use of vowel duration. For the child, learning how duration contributes to lexical contrast is complicated because segmental duration is implicated in many different linguistic distinctions. Using a language‐guided looking task, we measured English and Dutch 21‐month‐olds’ recognition of familiar words with normal or manipulated vowel durations. Dutch but not English learners were affected by duration changes, even though distributions of short and long vowels in both languages are similar, and English uses vowel duration as a cue to (for example) consonant coda voicing. Additionally, we found that word recognition in Dutch toddlers was affected by shortening but not lengthening of vowels, matching an asymmetry also found in Dutch adults. Considering the subtlety of the cross‐linguistic difference in the input, and the complexity of duration as a phonetic feature, our results suggest a strong capacity for phonetic analysis in children before their second birthday.

The development of vowel length as a subphonemic cue

“…We suggest that the differing nature of children's use is a result of the presence (in Krause 1982) or lack (the present study) of top-down cues. Finally, the lack of subphonemic use found in our study is consistent with children's lack of subphonemic sensitivity in a word recognition task (Swingley & Feest 2019).…”

“…The results found with children can also help to resolve some of the conflicting results we find when children are tested on their use of VL as a subphonemic cue to voicing (Greenlee 1980, Wardip-Fruin & Peach 1984, Krause 1982) and sensitivity to a subphonemic mismatch when recognizing familiar words (Swingley & Feest 2019). By using non-words that were not mapped to meaning, we were able to isolate the acoustic system and better understand how children treat VL in the absence of top-down information.…”

“…It is quite adaptive for children at this age to pay particular attention to this level because as they are rapidly expanding their vocabularies, the phonemic level is the proper level at which to encode new vocabulary information. This explanation lies at the intersection of word recognition work showing that children's phonetic representations of familiar words are phonemic (Swingley & Aslin 2000) but not subphonemic (Swingley & Feest 2019) and word learning work showing that children's phonetic representations of new words is underspecified (Stager & Werker 1997).…”

“…8-month-olds did not show different rates of looking across matches and mismatches and 14-month-olds showed differences only when the vowel was long. However, a subsequent study tested infants' ability to recognize words with a subphonemic mismatch between voicing and VL (Swingley & Feest 2019). Infants did not fixate at different rates as a function of the mispronunciation showing that word recognition was not hindered by a subphonemic mismatch.…”

Preschoolers Have Difficulty Discriminating Novel Minimal-Pair Words

“…Tense-lax vowel pairs are distinguished by first and second formants, and they also differ in duration, which is longer for tense vowels (Hillenbrand, Getty, Clark, & Wheeler, 1995). While young Englishlearning children (21 months) appear insensitive to changes in vowel duration (Swingley & van der Feest, 2019), English-learning infants have been shown to discriminate numerous vowel contrasts (see, e.g., Werker & Tees, 1999). Voiced and voiceless alternants of both stops (e.g.…”