Phonological specificity of vowels and consonants in early lexical representations

The quest for generalizations over consonants: Asymmetries between consonants and vowels are not the by-product of acoustic differences

“…Nazzi (2005), for example, demonstrated that consonants, not vowels, play a primary role in word learning for infants at 20 months of age; but see Mani and Plunkett's (2007) investigation of the perception of mispronounced known words. Importantly, such an effect is found even when vowels are compared with either plosive or nonplosive consonants (Nazzi & New, 2007), ruling out the possibility that these results are just produced by differences in sonority levels.…”

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

“…Indeed, while showed that 30-month-old English children give more weight to consonantal information when learning new words, Creel (2012) reported an equal sensitivity to consonant and vowel mispronunciations in familiar words in 3.5-year-old children. In addition, younger children have been found to access vocalic information as well as consonant information in lexical processing (Mani & Plunkett, 2007 and word learning (Floccia, Nazzi, Delle Luche, Poltrock & Goslin, in press). This undermines the assumption of a universal consonantal bias in place at the onset of lexical acquisition.…”

“…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). …”

Dutch and German 3-Year-Olds’ Representations of Voicing Alternations

“…Since Swingley and Aslin (2000) this procedure has often been used to test the phonetic specificity of young children's lexicons (e.g. Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Ballem & Plunkett, 2005;Fennell & Werker, 2003;Mani & Plunkett, 2007;Mills et al, 2004;Swingley, 2003Swingley, , 2009Van der Feest, 2007). It is assumed that if the target word is familiar, and the mental lexicon contains a detailed phonetic representation of the word, then mispronunciations will be disruptive to word recognition.…”