Input Frequency and Word Truncation in Child Japanese: Structural and Lexical Effects

Abstract

Recent research indicates that the statistical properties of the input have an impact on the prosodic shape of young children's word production. However, it is still not clear whether the effects of input statistics emerge from the frequency of prosodic structures or the frequency of individual lexical items. This issue is investigated in this study by analyzing cases of word truncation spontaneously produced by three Japanese-speaking children (1;5—2;1) and the frequencies of relevant words and prosodic word structures produced by their mothers. A significant correlation was found between children's truncation rates for individual target words and the frequency of the same words in the maternal input, but not between the truncation rates for different prosodic word structures and the frequencies of the corresponding structures in maternal speech. The size and shape of truncated outputs were better explained in terms of their correspondence to the target structures than the frequencies of shorter forms in the input. The results indicate that variation in early word truncation is systematically related at least to the lexical frequency of the target words, and that input frequency has a clearer connection to what truncates than how it truncates.

Lexical and Phonological Effects in Early Word Production

“…In general, high frequency facilitates both word recognition and word production (summary in Ellis, 2002), presumably due to strengthening of the lexical representation and access pathways as a result of repeated access in both perception and production (Bybee, 2001). Evidence for the role of word frequency in children’s linguistic processing is less robust; however, a few studies have found facilitative effects of word frequency in perception (Metsala, 1997), production (Anderson, 2007; Gierut & Storkel, 2002; Leonard & Ritterman, 1971; Morrisette, 1999; Ota, 2006; Tyler & Edwards, 1993), and word learning (Storkel, 2004a; but see Storkel, 2009). There is also some evidence that word frequency may be an important variable in the treatment of children with documented speech delays.…”

Input frequency and lexical variability in phonological development: a survival analysis of word-initial cluster production

“…To our knowledge, the only studies that specifically examined this question in typically developing children before the age of 3;0 are Ota (2006) and Sosa and Stoel-Gammon (in press; a publication version of Sosa's 2008 dissertation). Ota (2006) analyzed the spontaneous speech of three Japanese-speaking children between 1 ;5 and 2;1. For some age periods, a significant negative correlation was found between the proportion of syllable omission and the lexical frequency in the maternal speech of the children.…”

“…These findings indicate that the number of phonologically similar words needs to be controlled in order to determine whether the effects of lexical frequency are independent of neighborhood density. Although word length was taken into consideration in Ota's (2006) analysis of syllable omission in child Japanese, none of the other factors mentioned here were controlled for, leaving the possibility that the reported lexical input frequency effect was actually a reflection of the age of acquisition of words, number of neighbors, or the frequency of production rather than that of input.…”

Auditory Perception and Production of Speech Feature Contrasts by Pediatric Implant Users

“…Moreover, these are very frequently used vocabulary items, ones that would likely be repeatedly encountered in the child's experience and that may have also been target words for therapy. There is evidence that the production of a phoneme tends to be more accurate in items with greater lexical frequency than would production of that phoneme in less frequently occurring words (Ota 2006;Vogel Sosa & Stoel-Gammon 2006). It is thus feasible that a combination of phonological, lexical, and multisensory perceptual processes contributed to the production proficiency evidenced in the present study (e.g., see Norris et al 2003;Rosenblum 2008).…”