Phonological neighbourhoods in the developing lexicon

Coady, Jeffry A.; Aslin, Richard Ν.

doi:10.1017/s0305000903005579

Cited by 95 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…She concluded that children must have considerable acoustic-phonetic skill to be able to differentiate words in their lexicons. Coady and Aslin (2003) found that phonological neighborhoods are actually denser in the developing lexicon than in the mature lexicon, relative to vocabulary size. They concluded that children are not maintaining maximal distinctiveness among their lexical entries but rather are building their lexicons with a preference for words that contain more frequent phonotactic patterns.…”

Section: Evidence Of More Fine-grained Lexical Representations In Chimentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Dobrich and Scarborough (1992) did indeed find some evidence of these selectional constraints, but only at the earliest stages of lexical acquisition. More recent analyses of the structure of the developing lexicon have shown that childrenÕs lexicons actually contain many similar-sounding words (Coady & Aslin, 2003). Furthermore, the neighborhood structure of childrenÕs early lexicons suggests that children might actually construct their lexicons by exploiting the more familiar and frequent sound patterns rather than by filling in the acoustic-phonetic gaps in the lexicon.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EveÕs sessions were excluded from the analysis because her family moved away when she was 2 years 3 months, leaving an incomplete data set for current purposes. All words in each corpus were transcribed as described in Coady and Aslin (2003). Relative phoneme frequencies and diphone frequencies for Adam and Sarah, as well as for their mothers, were calculated separately.…”

Section: Stimulus Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Young children’s sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon

Coady

Aslin

2004

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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114

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A series of three experiments examined children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactic structure as reflected in the relative frequencies with which speech sounds occur and co-occur in American English. Children, ages 212 and 312 years, participated in a nonword repetition task that examined their sensitivity to the frequency of individual phonetic segments and to the frequency of combinations of segments. After partialling out ease of articulation and lexical variables, both groups of children repeated higher phonotactic frequency nonwords more accurately than they did low phonotactic frequency nonwords, suggesting sensitivity to phoneme frequency. In addition, sensitivity to individual phonetic segments increased with age. Finally, older children, but not younger children, were sensitive to the frequency of larger (diphone) units. These results suggest not only that young children are sensitive to fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information in the developing lexicon but also that sensitivity to all aspects of the sound structure increases over development. Implications for the acoustic nature of both developing and mature lexical representations are discussed.

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Section: Evidence Of More Fine-grained Lexical Representations In Chimentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Stimulus Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Young children’s sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon

Coady

Aslin

2004

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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114

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“…In a study that examined learning of novel word forms alone (word-form learning) as well as learning of novel word forms paired with referents (word learning), Heisler (2005) found facilitative effects of both higher phonotactic probability and higher neighbourhood density. Retrospective analyses indicate that higher neighbourhood density is associated with an earlier age of acquisition, once again suggesting that neighbourhood density facilitates word learning, at least for certain types of words (Coady & Aslin 2003;Storkel 2004). Hollich et al (2000bHollich et al ( , 2002 and Swingley & Aslin (2007) experimentally examined the effect of neighbourhood density on word learning in toddlers, finding that this variable did affect word learning, although in these studies the effect was found to be reversed, so that learning appeared to be better for word forms from low-rather than high-density neighbourhoods.…”

Section: Recent Foci Of Investigationmentioning

confidence: 93%

Word learning, phonological short-term memory, phonotactic probability and long-term memory: towards an integrated framework

Gupta

Tisdale

2009

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Word learning is studied in a multitude of ways, and it is often not clear what the relationship is between different phenomena. In this article, we begin by outlining a very simple functional framework that despite its simplicity can serve as a useful organizing scheme for thinking about various types of studies of word learning. We then review a number of themes that in recent years have emerged as important topics in the study of word learning, and relate them to the functional framework, noting nevertheless that these topics have tended to be somewhat separate areas of study. In the third part of the article, we describe a recent computational model and discuss how it offers a framework that can integrate and relate these various topics in word learning to each other. We conclude that issues that have typically been studied as separate topics can perhaps more fruitfully be thought of as closely integrated, with the present framework offering several suggestions about the nature of such integration.Keywords: word learning; integrative framework; phonological short-term memory; phonological learning; short-term and long-term memory interactions; computational modellingAlthough human children and adults learn new words effortlessly, understanding how they do so is a complex endeavour. Although it seems clear that word learning or vocabulary acquisition entails learning a word form, a meaning and the link between them (e.g. Saussure 1916; Desrochers & Begg 1987), this simple formulation encompasses a multitude of different abilities and subcomponents. As a result, the terms 'vocabulary acquisition' and 'word learning' have been used to mean a wide variety of different things, as revealed by consideration of the many different facets of what has been studied as word learning (for review, see Gupta 2005b). In this article, we begin by outlining a very simple functional framework that despite its simplicity can serve as a useful organizing scheme for thinking about various types of studies of word learning. In §2, we review a number of themes that in recent years have emerged as important topics in the study of word learning, and relate them to the functional framework, noting nevertheless that these topics have tended to be somewhat separate areas of study. In the third part of the article, we describe a recent computational model developed by Gupta & Tisdale (2009), and discuss how it offers a framework that can integrate and relate these various topics to each other. We conclude that issues that have typically been studied as separate topics can perhaps more fruitfully be thought of as closely integrated, with the present framework offering several suggestions about the nature of such integration. FUNCTIONAL ASPECTS OF WORD LEARNINGIn considering the functional aspects of word learning, it is useful to begin with some terminology. First of all, we will reserve the term vocabulary acquisition to refer to the overall phenomenon of acquiring a vocabulary of words over an extended period of time. We will reserve the...

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“…Not all the data fit this story, however. There may be as much overlap in small vocabularies as in larger ones (Coady & Aslin, 2003), and studies of infants' word processing have found evidence that their word representations have more phonetic detail than the global/wholeword account would suggest (Swingley & Aslin, 2000). It is an open question at this point just what developmental changes occur in children's phonological representations and what might cause any such changes.…”

Section: Phonological Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Experience and Language Milestones During Early Childhood

Hoff¹

Blackwell Handbook of Early Childhood Development

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Phonological neighbourhoods in the developing lexicon

Cited by 95 publications

References 27 publications

Young children’s sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon

Young children’s sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon

Word learning, phonological short-term memory, phonotactic probability and long-term memory: towards an integrated framework

Language Experience and Language Milestones During Early Childhood

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