Lexical and child-related factors in word variability and accuracy in infants

Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of lexical age of acquisition (AoA), phonological complexity, age and expressive vocabulary on spoken word variability and accuracy in typically developing infants, aged 1;9-3;1. It was hypothesized that later-acquired words and those with more complex speech sounds would be produced more variably and less accurately than earlier-acquired words and those with less complex speech sounds. It was also hypothesized that word variability would decrease and word accuracy would increase with increasing age and vocabulary knowledge. Participants' productions of 20 target words, experimentally controlled for AoA and phonological complexity, were audio-recorded during a play session. Results revealed a nonsignificant effect of AoA on variability and accuracy, a significant effect of phonological complexity on variability and accuracy, a significant effect of age on variability and accuracy and a significant effect of vocabulary on variability. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Inter-word variability of Hungarian affricates /ʦ, ʧ/ in the speech of monolingual children with and without language disorders

“…By age 5;0, children exhibited no variable production of affricates at all. These findings are in line with those from studies on intra-word variability that showed that variable production characterises early speech (Holm, Crosbie, & Dodd, 2007;Macrae, 2013;Sosa & Stoel-Gammon, 2006). Moreover, in view of the possible overlap between groups (mentioned above in the ''Method'' section), some caution is needed in interpreting the frequency data shown here, especially in the age range between 4;0 and 4;11, when IWV tends to be an uncommon error type for the production of affricates.…”

“…Vihman & Croft, 2007). Ferguson and Farwell (1975) argued that one among the many sources of variable production can be the presence of harder sounds in the word forms, and studies by McLeod and Hewett (2008) and Macrae (2013) also confirmed the effect of phonemic complexity. Furthermore, in their study on intra-word variability, Leonard and his colleagues found that words with phonological aspects emerging during acquisition resulted in more variable production than those containing non-acquired aspects (Leonard, Rowan, Morris, & Fey, 1982).…”

“…The age of acquisition of the consonants comprising the word and the stage of phonological development at the time of investigation are among factors reported to associate with accuracy (cf. Macrae, 2013).…”

“…Studies on intra-word variability (that is, the divergent realisations of a given phoneme in the same lexical item) found that typically developing English-speaking children exhibit considerable variability until 2;0, and some variability still exists at 2;9 (cf. Sosa & Stoel-Gammon, 2006;Macrae, 2013). Variability is considered to be one of the indications of the reorganisation of early representation of word forms, when a shift in stored forms, from word-based to segment-based phonological representations, occurs gradually (cf.…”

Intraword Variability in Typical Speech Development

“…Intraword variability has most often been used to describe a frequently observed phenomenon in the speech of very young, typically developing children. Factors that have been found to influence how variably a word is produced include word frequency and phonological neighborhood density (Sosa & Stoel-Gammon, 2012) as well as phonological complexity (Macrae, 2013;Sosa & Stoel-Gammon, 2012), with longer words with more complex phonological structures produced with greater variability. Their data include one notable example of a girl, aged 1;4 (years;months), who produced the word pen 10 different ways during one 30-min session.…”