Consonant age of acquisition effects are robust in children's nonword repetition performance

Abstract

The underlying processes of nonword repetition (NWR) have been studied extensively in both typical and atypical development. Most of the research examining long-term memory effects on NWR has focused on lexical and sublexical variables that can only be computed relative to the lexicon of a specific language (e.g., phonotactic probability). Sublexical variables that can be defined without reference to the lexicon (e.g., consonant age of acquisition; CAoA) have received little attention, although recent work has shown a CAoA effect on NWR in young adults by measuring performance differences when the stimuli comprise consonants acquired later versus earlier in speech development. The purpose of this study was to identify whether this sublexical effect occurs earlier in development. Thirtyone typically developing first and second graders completed NWR, nonword reading, and auditory lexical decision tasks. Nonword accuracy and word-nonword discriminability were consistently lower for items comprising later versus earlier acquired phonemes, even after controlling for vocabulary knowledge, but there were no differences in speed measures. Patterns of performance were similar to the CAoA effects observed in young adults from previous work. Results indicate that the sensitivity of NWR performance to these sublexical long-term memory effects occurs in childhood and reflects adultlike patterns of performance.Nonword repetition (NWR), which requires the immediate repetition of a spoken nonword, is sensitive to both language experience and language ability as observed across a broad range of groups including adults and children, first and second language learners, and individuals with and without a variety of communication disorders. Because of its clinical utility, significant work has focused on understanding the cognitive linguistic mechanisms engaged during the task in order to better interpret typical and atypical processes involved in language learning. Although NWR was originally viewed as a measure of phonological short-term memory, more current empirical findings and theoretical refinements suggest NWR is a multidimensional measure affected by phonological short-term memory ability, the storage and retrieval of linguistic information from long-term memory

Perceptual Learning and Production Practice Differentially Affect How Children Produce Novel Words

“…As an example calculation of a production practice effect for the baseline-test condition, average accuracy for /tʌvtʃəp/ at baseline was 9.94 and at test was 10.67, resulting in a production practice effect of 1.05. The scores were then entered into regression analyses with a sum of the ages of acquisition for each item's four consonants using acquisition data from McLeod and Crowe (2018; see also Moore, 2018;Moore, Fiez, & Tompkins, 2017 for experimental consonant age of acquisition effects in linguistic performance), as well as the sums of phone and biphone probabilities calculated by the online phonotactic probability calculator (Vitevitch & Luce, 2004). Examples of these by-item phonological properties are presented in Table 3.…”

“…Nevertheless, the observed correlation between production practice and consonant age of acquisition suggests that production practice is most beneficial for sounds that are acquired later. This is perhaps surprising because novel words comprising later developing consonants often correspond with decreased performance in tasks such as nonword repetition, nonword reading, and lexical decision compared to words comprising earlier developing consonants (Moore, 2018;Moore et al, 2017;Moore, Tompkins, & Dollaghan, 2010). Moore and colleagues posit that consonant acquisition impacts how phonological information is stored in long-term memory.…”

L'épreuve de répétition de non-mots LITMUS-NWR-FR évalue-t-elle la phonologie ?

“…Les tâches de RNM sont utilisées depuis le milieu des années 1970 pour évaluer les enfants et les adultes présentant des déficits dans des domaines différents (Coady & Evans, 2008). Initialement conçues pour évaluer la MCTv (Moore, 2018), des épreuves de RNM ont plus récemment été développées pour l'évaluation de la phonologie des enfants présentant un trouble du langage (Archibald, 2008).…”

“…Elles sont également complexes et multidéterminées (Gupta,2006). En effet, elles mobilisent des capacités langagières (Moore, 2018) ainsi que des habiletés cognitives telles que les compétences mnésiques à court et long termes (Rispens & Baker, 2012) ou la FC (Léon, Dias, Martins, & Seabra, 2018). Par conséquent, elles peuvent être sensibles à des effets psycholinguistiques dont la similarité phonologique.…”

Speech development in preschool children: evaluating the contribution of phonological short-term and phonological working memory

“…Nonword repetition tasks are commonly regarded as tapping the phonological loop. However, NWR tasks are complex, incorporating speech processing components such as speech perception, phonological encoding, long-term memory, working memory, and oro-motor planning, and execution (Moore, 2018). Thus, reported differences in pSTM performance could be task related.…”