Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own‐name recognition at 5 months

Abstract

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French-learning 5-month-olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants' reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular spectrally based distance. These results establish that consonant changes do not affect lexical recognition at 5 months, while vowel changes do; the consonant bias observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months through additional language exposure.

Semantic Specificity in One-Year-Olds’ Word Comprehension

“…Indeed, months before their first birthday, infants show modest but consistent comprehension for common and proper nouns that are frequent in their daily input (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012, 2015; Bouchon, Floccia, Fux, Adda-Decker, & Nazzi, 2015; Parise & Csibra, 2012; Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999, 2012). In the subsequent months, comprehension improves, and production begins (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, & Bates, 1994; Fernald, Pinto, Swingley, Weinberg, & McRoberts, 1998).…”

Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified: Own Name Recognition in British English‐Learning 5‐Month‐Olds

“…Bouchon et al. () showed that French‐learning 5‐month‐olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English‐learning 5‐month‐olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to.…”

“…In the present study, we embarked on an extension of Bouchon et al. 's study () to British English, for a number of reasons. First, English and French are contrasted on a number of acoustic and phonological parameters that could impact differently task complexity when infants are presented with minimally different stimuli (Pater, Stager, & Werker, ).…”

“…Second, Bouchon et al. () were searching for an early asymmetry in the processing of vowels and consonants, based on the proposal by Nespor, Peña, and Mehler () that these two phonological categories serve different functions in language processing (with consonants providing lexical information and vowels syntactic and prosodic information). While such an asymmetry was found in French‐learning infants (e.g., Havy & Nazzi, ; Nazzi, ), recent findings on young British English and Danish learners suggest that its development follows a language‐specific path (e.g., Floccia, Nazzi, Delle Luche, Poltrock, & Goslin, ; Højen & Nazzi, ; Mani & Plunkett, , ).…”

Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Theories of Phonological Acquisition: A Big Data Approach

“…However, recent work suggests that vowels are more important than consonants in lexical recognition for infants: When 5-month-olds are presented with mispronunciation of the onset of their own name, which either began with a vowel or a consonant, infants' looking patterns suggested that own-name recognition is disrupted to a greater extent by the vowel change than the consonant change [21]. Thus, at least at young ages, vowels seem a reasonable choice for assessing potential phonology-lexicon interactions.…”