Phonotactic probabilities in young children's speech production

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-yearolds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and contained the identical coda across low and high phonotactic probability pairs. This allowed for comparisons of children's productions of the same coda consonant in low and high phonotactic probability environments. Children were significantly more likely to produce the same coda in high phonotactic probability non-words than in low phonotactic probability non-words. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonotactic probability is a predictor of coda production in English. Moreover, this finding provides further evidence for the role of the input and distribution of sound patterns in the ambient language as a basis for phonological acquisition.

Phonological Constraints on Children’s Production of English Third Person Singular – s

“…There is evidence that the frequency of inflected plurals in the input that children hear is a good predictor of their likelihood of producing plural -s (Zapf, 2004). Further attesting to the role of input statistics, several studies have shown that typically developing children (Edwards & Beckman, 2008;Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004;Munson, 2001;Storkel, 2001;Zamuner, Gerken, & Hammond, 2004) as well as those with SLI (Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005;Munson, Kurtz, and Windsor, 2005) repeat novel words with high-probability phoneme sequences more accurately than they repeat those with low-probability sequences. In addition, many of these studies indicate that children with smaller vocabularies are more likely to be affected by input statistics than children with larger vocabularies.…”

Examination of the Locus of Positional Effects on Children's Production of Plural –s : Considerations From Local and Global Speech Planning

“…It may well be that these factors, along with increased utterance length, all contributed to the lower plural production rates in utterance-medial position. Indeed, research has shown that the relative frequency with which a coda consonant occurs in the lexicon is related to the degree that it is produced in children's speech (Zamuner, Gerken, & Hammond, 2004). Future research will be needed to independently determine the possible effects of these lexical, prosodic, and utterance-length factors on morpheme production.…”

The sensitivity of children with SLI to phonotactic probabilities during lexical access

“…Second, phonotactic probabilities influence children's ability to encode and maintain a new phonological sequence in memory. In a nonword repetition task, they are more accurate when repeating high-than low-phonotactic frequency nonwords (Coady & Aslin, 2004;Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004;Zamuner, Gerken, & Hammond, 2004). And third, phonotactic probabilities have been shown to be involved in spoken word recognition in toddlers.…”