Building phonological lexical representations

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how much detail young children's word representations contain. We investigate early representations of place of articulation and voicing contrasts, inspired by previously attested asymmetrical patterns in children's early word productions. We tested Dutch-learning 20- and 24-month-olds’ perception of these fundamentally different contrasts in a mispronunciation-detection paradigm. Our results show that different kinds and directions of phonological changes yield different effects. Both 20- and 24-month-olds noticed coronal mispronunciations of labials, but not vice versa. The 24-month-olds noticed voiced mispronunciations of voiceless stops, but not vice versa, while the 20-month-olds failed to notice any voicing mispronunciations. We argue that early lexical representations are specified in very systematic ways, that not all phonological contrasts are encoded at the same time and that the phonological system of a language determines which contrasts are specified first in the representations of early words.

Auditory Lexical Decisions in Developmental Language Disorder: A Meta-Analysis of Behavioral Studies

“…Maillart et al (2004), for instance, report that children with DLD were relatively less accurate when nonword manipulations occurred in initial or final (though not medial) positions, while Befi-Lopes et al (2010) report a word initial manipulation advantage relative to language-matched controls for children with DLD lexical age 5;0. It is plausible that this disagreement is attributable in part to assessing samples with different first languages (French-and Brazilian-Portuguese-speaking respectively), with the word regions most amenable to segmentation apparently moderated by the phonological system of a particular language (van der Feest & Fikkert, 2015). This example illustrates the complex interaction between fine-grained differences in stimulus type and the sampling variation discussed above.…”

Dutch and German 3-Year-Olds’ Representations of Voicing Alternations

“…Since Swingley and Aslin (2000) this procedure has often been used to test the phonetic specificity of young children's lexicons (e.g. Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Ballem & Plunkett, 2005;Fennell & Werker, 2003;Mani & Plunkett, 2007;Mills et al, 2004;Swingley, 2003Swingley, , 2009Van der Feest, 2007). It is assumed that if the target word is familiar, and the mental lexicon contains a detailed phonetic representation of the word, then mispronunciations will be disruptive to word recognition.…”

Understanding the developing sound system: interactions between sounds and words

“…75 Together, these word recognition studies with familiar words demonstrate that infants' representations encode at least some phonetic detail, and that degrees of phonological differences (at least in terms of number of features) factor into whether a mispronunciation will be detected. However, this depends on the task, suggesting that a phonological featural system does not necessarily need to be accessed (though some work has argued for early feature representations 76 ).…”