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

Abstract

The voicing contrast is neutralised syllable and word finally in Dutch and German, leading to alternations within the morphological paradigm (e.g. Dutch 'bed(s). Despite structural similarity, language-specific morphological, phonological and lexical properties impact on the distribution of this alternation in the two languages. Previous acquisition research has focused on one language only, predominantly focusing on children's production accuracy, concluding that alternations are not acquired until late in the acquisition process in either language. This paper adapts a perceptual method to investigate how voicing alternations are represented in the mental lexicon of Dutch and German 3-year-olds. Sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing word-medially in plural forms was measured using a visual fixation procedure. Dutch children exhibited evidence of overgeneralising the voicing alternation, whereasGerman children consistently preferred the correct pronunciation to mispronunciations.Results indicate that the acquisition of voicing alternations is influenced by languagespecific factors beyond the alternation itself.

Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition

“…For the GAMM on experimental trials, we modeled empirical-logit-transformed fixations in the CROSS-SPLICE condition in order to assess sensitivity to phonetic mismatch. The time window of interest was chosen for analysis of experimental trials between 300 ms after word onset to account for eye movement programming delay (Buckler & Fikkert, 2016;Zamuner et al, 2016) until 2000 ms after word onset, a time at which it is likely that children will continue to look at the images based on the prompt. Similarly to other GAMM analyses (Porretta, Tucker & Järvikivi, 2016;Porretta et al, 2018), random effects corresponded to a combination of participant and trial (i.e., EVENT), allowing each trial (for each participant) to have its own intercept in the model.…”

Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced

“…The window of analysis started 200 ms after the beginning of the target, accounting for the time it takes to initiate eye movements (Matin, Shao, & Boff, 1993;Salverda, Kleinschmidt, & Tanenhaus, 2014). Note that in studies with children, analyses can also begin 300 ms after the target, due to longer latencies in children's eye movements (Buckler & Fikkert, 2016; also see Swingley & Aslin, 2000, for a discussion of latencies). All analyses presented below were also done starting at 300 ms after word onset, with the same results.…”

How Native Prosody Affects Pitch Processing during Word Learning in Limburgian and Dutch Toddlers and Adults

“…This resulted in three trial orders. To make sure children would remain engaged in the task, four filler trials involved correct pronunciations of four well-known words (e.g., Singh et al, 2015 ; Buckler and Fikkert, 2016 ). Test phases across all versions started with a filler trial to help children understand the nature of the task.…”

“…Test trials were excluded if (1) a child looked less than 500 ms during the 2000 ms post-naming window (e.g., Quam and Swingley, 2010 ; Singh et al, 2014 ; Tsuji et al, 2016 ), (2) the participant fixated only one of two objects during the 2500 ms pre-naming window (e.g., White and Morgan, 2008 ; Mani and Plunkett, 2011 ; Singh et al, 2015 ; Buckler and Fikkert, 2016 ), (3) an equipment or experimenter error occurred, and (4) if a participant refused to participate (e.g., by getting up and walking around) and the experiment had to be aborted.…”

“…A block was excluded if (1) a participant did not contribute at least one valid trial per condition (CP and MP) during the test phase (e.g., Buckler and Fikkert, 2016 ; Tsuji et al, 2016 ), and (2) total looking time during target and/or distracter learning trials was under 20 s out of a total of 60 s (e.g., Tsuji et al, 2016 ). The latter criterion is based on the assumption that children who pay more attention to the novel objects during learning should be better able to retain the novel word-object mapping ( Hilton and Westermann, 2016 ).…”