Word learning and phonetic processing in preschool-age children

Havy, Mélanie; Bertoncini, Josiane; Nazzi, Thierry

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.08.002

Cited by 30 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Word learning tasks with pairs of words differing by one phoneme reveal that French-learning toddlers are sensitive to consonant but not to vowel contrasts until the age of 30 months (Havy & Nazzi, 2009;Nazzi, 2005;Nazzi & Bertoncini, 2009;Nazzi, Floccia, Moquet, & Butler, 2009;Nazzi & New, 2007). Moreover, even older French-learning children and French adults show a consonant bias in word learning tasks (Havy, Bertoncini & Nazzi, 2011;Havy et al, in press). A comparable asymmetry is observed with a familiar word recognition task in French-learning 14-to-23-month-olds: a consonant change prevents word recognition, but not a vowel change (Zesiger & Jöhr, 2011).…”

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“…Added to the fact that the English vocalic system is more complex in terms of diphthongs and contrastive features than the French one, consonants are, in theory, comparatively more informative in English than in French, so we could expect a larger consonantal bias in English. It is interesting to note however that cross-linguistic developmental evidence points to the exact opposite effect, as French-learning toddlers show an earlier and more consistent consonant bias than English-learning children (Floccia et al, in press;Havy & Nazzi, 2009;Havy et al 2011;Mani & Plunkett, 2007). …”

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Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

Luche

Poltrock

Goslin

et al. 2014

Journal of Memory and Language

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Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

Luche

Poltrock

Goslin

et al. 2014

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…A number of studies (e.g. Havy, Bertoncini & Nazzi, 2011;Havy & Nazzi, 2009) suggest that consonant changes play a more critical role in word comprehension than vowel changes. Possibly, reduction affects mainly vowels in infant-directed speech whereas it also affects consonants in adult-directed speech.…”

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Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Lahey

Ernestus

2013

Language Learning and Development

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In spontaneous conversations between adults, words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms. The question arises whether infant-directed speech also contains phonetic reduction. If so, infants would be presented with speech input that enables them to acquire reduced variants from an early age. This study compared speech directed at 11-and 12-month-old infants with adult-directed conversational speech and adult-directed read speech. In an acoustic study, 216 tokens of the Dutch words allemaal and helemaal from speech corpora were analyzed for duration, number of syllables and vowel quality. In a perception study, adult participants rated these same materials for reduction and provided phonetic transcriptions. The results show that these two words are frequently reduced in infant-directed speech, and that their degree of reduction is comparable to conversational adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that lexical representations for reduced pronunciation variants can be acquired early in linguistic development. 3An important component of language acquisition is the learning of words and their meanings.Before infants can attach meanings to words, they must acquire the ability to recognize a given word across different contexts. This is a complicated task, as each token of a word is acoustically different. Pronunciation variation can, for instance, be caused by speaker gender, voice characteristics and accent or dialectical variation. This raises the question of how infants learn to cope with pronunciation variation.In spontaneous conversations between adults, another common cause of pronunciation variation is reduction: words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms (for an introduction to the phenomenon of reduction, see Ernestus & Warner, 2011). For instance, the word yesterday can be pronounced in South-West American English as [jɛʃei]. Phonetic reduction leads to great variability in speech. Johnson (2004) showed that in a corpus of American English, no less than 20% of word tokens were pronounced with at least one segment missing, and 6% with at least one syllable missing. Similar results have been found for Dutch spontaneous speech (Schuppler, Ernestus, Scharenborg & Boves, 2011). In this study, we investigate whether highly reduced forms are prevalent in infant-directed speech, and we discuss the implications of this type of pronunciation variation for the building of a lexicon.Despite the high frequency of occurrence of reduced pronunciation variants, these forms normally do not seem to hinder communication. Adult listeners appear to understand these variants without any problem, at least when they are heard in context (Ernestus, Baayen & Schreuder, 2002). This raises the question of when infants can start learning to process reduced variants. In this study we investigated whether words are also reduced in speech to 11-and 12-month-old infants, that is whether highly reduced pronunciation variants occur in infant-di...

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“…That is, the consonantal bias was observed only at 3 years, but not at 5. In a second experiment, they found a consonantal bias at 3 years, a change at 4 years favoring vowels, and again an absence of consonantal bias at 5 years (Havy et al, 2011). The authors concluded that there is a bias favoring consonants in lexical representations, but this bias follows a U-shaped developmental pattern, being present in early stages of lexical development, disappearing around 4 years (when attention to vowels increases as they are relevant for syntactic and morphological acquisition) and reappearing in adulthood.…”

Section: Consonants and Vowels At Initial And Final Word Position (Cvmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…The bias favoring the representation of consonants has been explored in pre-school children, in order to offer a more complete developmental perspective (Havy, Bertoncini and Nazzi, 2011). In their study, 3-to 5-year-old French children were presented with two pseudo-words (which differed only in a consonant or in a vowel segment) associated to two novel objects.…”

Section: Consonants and Vowels At Initial And Final Word Position (Cvmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consonantes, vocales y niveles de especificación en las representaciones fonológicas del primer léxico: una revisión

Ramon-Casas

Bosch

2014

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Título: Consonantes, vocales y niveles de especificación en las representaciones fonológicas del léxico inicial: una revisión. Resumen: Se presenta una revisión de las principales investigaciones sobre el formato de representación léxica en etapas iniciales del desarrollo lingüís-tico. Los resultados actuales, revelan un importante nivel de especificación fonológica en las representaciones del primer léxico, antes incluso de los dos años. Estos resultados se explican desde un marco teórico que plantea la existencia de múltiples niveles de codificación y sugiere diferencias en el acceso a la información representada en función de las demandas de la tarea o del nivel de vocabulario alcanzado. Un área de debate actual se sitúa en torno a la existencia de posibles diferencias en el grado de especificación de las vocales y consonantes representadas en el léxico. Este artículo analiza el estado actual de este debate teniendo en cuenta los resultados recientes obtenidos en investigaciones realizadas en distintas lenguas, con poblaciones de diferente entorno lingüístico (monolingüe y bilingüe) y metodologías experimentales que suponen distinto grado de exigencia cognitiva. Palabras clave (4-8): Representación fonológica; desarrollo léxico; percepción del habla; reconocimiento de palabras; aprendizaje de palabras; especificación fonológica; vocales; consonantes.Abstract: A review of the main studies on the format of lexical representation in the initial stages of language development is presented. Current investigations reveal a significant level of phonological specificity in the representation of words in the first lexicon, even before age two years. These results can be explained from a theoretical framework that posits the existence of multiple levels of encoding and suggests differences in accessing the represented information as a function of task demands or vocabulary size. The existence of possible differences in the degree of specification of vowels and consonants represented in the lexicon is an area of current debate. This article discusses the present state of this debate in the light of recent findings from research with different languages, in populations with different linguistic environments (monolingual and bilingual) and from experimental approaches that involve varying degrees of cognitive demands.

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Word learning and phonetic processing in preschool-age children

Cited by 30 publications

References 57 publications

Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Consonantes, vocales y niveles de especificación en las representaciones fonológicas del primer léxico: una revisión

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