Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words

Abstract

Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. This suggests that variable phonological input in the form of dialect variation impacts the degree of specificity of lexical representations in early infancy.

British English infants segment words only with exaggerated infant-directed speech stimuli

“…It is clear from the current study and the French Canadian and Parisian comparison (Nazzi et al, 2014) that researchers need to be increasingly alert to the possibility that within-language dialectal or IDS-style variations could have a noticeable impact on infants' behaviour in classic language development paradigms (e.g. familiar word recognition using preferential looking as in Durrant, Delle Luche, Cattani, & Floccia, 2014, or Floccia, Delle Luche, Durrant, Butler, & Goslin, 2012. Further research will be needed to evaluate whether similar differences in word segmentation abilities will be found within and across languages as a function of IDS or other dialectal idiosyncrasies.…”

Two-year-olds interpret novel phonological neighbors as familiar words.

“…If so, it is surprising that children were, for the most part, equally unlikely to treat vowel alterations and consonant alterations as lexically significant. In American English, the vowels bear much of the distinction among accents and among talkers (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005), and if children note that the talkers in their environment produce the vowels of words differently, they might be inclined to discount vowel variation relative to consonant variation (though see Durrant, Delle Luche, Cattani, & Floccia, 2014). But such effects were minor here.…”

A methodological investigation of the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm: Methods of analyses, picture selection and data rejection criteria

“…This mirrored the outcome of the classic mean-based looking times analyses, namely a robust interaction pronunciation × naming in the Fixation Plus condition and none in the No Fixation condition. While very promising to estimate the speed of word recognition (like Durrant et al, 2014;Fernald et al, 2006), this approach needs to evolve to establish the minimal temporal window where pronunciation differences are meaningful (re. the very short lived pronunciation effect in the No Fixation condition).…”

“…Although desirable, such a control is not always possible given the restricted choice of stimulus items in young children and the need for a sufficient number of trials per participant. Some experiments have controlled for this possible preference effect (Mani & Plunkett, 2007;Swingley & Aslin, 2000, presenting the same visual stimuli at least twice, while others have not (Durrant, Delle Luche, Cattani, & Floccia, 2014;Floccia, Delle Luche, Durrant, Butler, & Goslin, 2012; but still found comparable results. One possible compromise, as suggested by Fernald et al (2008), is to ensure an equal preference for both pictures during the pre-naming phase by monitoring looking times in silence during a pilot experiment.…”