Fourteen‐month‐olds pay attention to vowels in novel words

Abstract

Recent research has shown that infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of words when tested using a preferential looking task. The results of these studies indicate that infants are able to access the phonological detail of words when engaged in lexical recognition. However, most of this work has focused on mispronunciations of consonants in familiar and novel words. Very little is known about the role that vowels play in constraining lexical access during the early stages of lexical development. We describe a word learning study with 14‐ and 18‐month‐old infants that tests their sensitivity to mispronunciations of word‐medial vowels using a preferential looking task. We found that both age groups demonstrated recognition of correctly pronounced tokens of the newly learnt words but not mispronounced tokens. These results indicate that vowels constrain lexical access of novel words by as early as 14 months of age, and add to the growing body of literature indicating that infants exploit detailed phonological information when processing both familiar and newly learnt words.

Impossible to _gnore: Word-Form Inconsistency Slows Preschool Children's Word-Learning

“…First, newly learned words are highly sensitive to accent-like changes: children have difficulty recognizing a word that is changed by a single vowel feature. While this fits accounts of detailed novel-word representations in toddlers (Mani & Plunkett, 2008), it does not lead to strong recognition of newly learned words in a new accent. A pragmatically supportive context (though not necessarily exposure to the accent) aids recognition of accented forms, though accuracy is still lower than for learned pronunciations.…”

Young infants encode lexical stress in newly encountered words

“…Findings from interactive object categorization tasks with novel words have demonstrated that even 20-month-olds will confuse labels that minimally differ in their vowel while succeeding at distinguishing labels that minimally differ in consonants (Nazzi, 2005;Nazzi & New, 2007). Although the results of these studies suggest that infants may have impoverished representations, infants do detect minimal differences if the learning condition is enriched (Ballem & Plunkett, 2005;Fennell, 2006), if infants are presented with familiar or known words (Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Fennell, 2004;Fennell & Werker, 2003;Swingley & Aslin, 2002), or if sound differences are large enough (i.e., a change in three features: height, backness, and rounding, e.g., mot mispronounced as mit) (Mani & Plunkett, 2008). Thus, it is unclear whether the differences observed in these studies are the result of impoverished representations or perhaps the result of cognitive demands (Fennell & Werker, 2003;Fennell & Werker, 2004).…”

Napping facilitates word learning in early lexical development

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