Restructuring of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon

Abstract

Previous evidence suggests that the structure of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon may differ from that of the fully developed lexicon. The similarity relationships used to organize words into neighbourhoods was investigated in  pre-school children (age  ;  to  ; ) using a two alternative forced-choice classification task. Children classified the similarity of test words relative to a standard word to determine neighbourhood membership. The similarity relationship between the test and standard words varied orthogonally in terms of type of similarity and position of overlap. Standard words were drawn from neighbourhoods differing in density. Results showed that dense neighbourhoods were organized by phoneme similarity in the onsetj nucleus or rhyme positions of overlap. In contrast, sparse neighbourhoods appeared to be organized by phoneme similarity in the onsetj nucleus, but manner similarity in the rhyme. These results are integrated with previous findings from infants and adults to propose a developmental course of change in the mental lexicon.

Lexical exposure and word-form encoding in 1.5-year-olds.

“…Neither vocabulary measure was correlated with the size of children's mispronunciation effects, whether the two subject groups were considered separately or together. Although the fairly small sample sizes here preclude strong conclusions on the basis of these null results, the present lack of relationship between mispronunciation sensitivity and vocabulary size is consistent with previous studies using this method (Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Swingley, 2003;Swingley & Aslin, 2000, 2002.…”

“…This is not intended to be read as a claim that children's words are made up of contrastive phonological features or that children necessarily ascribe contrastiveness to all phonologically different strings. Fennell & Werker, 2003, 2004Nazzi, 2005;Swingley, 2003;Swingley & Aslin, 2000, 2002White, Morgan, & Wier, 2004). Mispronunciation effects indicate that children know the phonological form of a word well enough to treat the canonical form as a more typical realization than the deviant form.…”

Literacy effects on language and vision: Emergent effects from an amodal shared resource (ASR) computational model

“…Does literacy lead to a finer tuning of perceptual categories and, consequently, improvements in the precision of phoneme identification (Hoonhorst et al, 2011;Serniclaes, Ventura, Morais, & Kolinsky, 2005)? Or does literacy not play a crucial role, instead is it that the fidelity of phonological representations increases across development driven by the need to differentiate, within an increasingly large lexicon, between an increasing number of phonologically similar items (Garlock, Walley, & Metsala, 2001;Storkel, 2002)?…”

The spread of the phonological neighborhood influences spoken word recognition

“…Several studies in English have demonstrated that neighborhood density influences various aspects of spoken language processing, including lexical acquisition (e.g., Storkel, 2002Storkel, , 2004, speech production (e.g., Vitevitch, 1997Vitevitch, , 2002bVitevitch & Sommers, 2003), and spoken word recognition (Luce & Pisoni, 1998; see also Vitevitch & Rodríguez, 2005, for a discussion of the influence of neighborhood density on spoken word recognition in Spanish).In several laboratory-based spoken word recognition tasks, Luce and Pisoni (1998) demonstrated that English words with sparse neighborhoods are responded to more quickly and accurately than those with dense neighborhoods, suggesting that multiple word forms are activated and compete with each other during spoken word recognition. Words with large numbers of phonological neighbors (i.e., dense neighborhoods) are subject to greater competition and therefore recognized more slowly and less accurately than words with few phonological neighbors (i.e., sparse neighborhoods).…”