Twelve‐Month‐Olds Know Their Cups From Their Keps and Tups

Abstract

Fourteen-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of the vowels and consonants in familiar words (N. ). To examine the development of this sensitivity further, the current study tests 12-month-olds' sensitivity to different kinds of vowel and consonant mispronunciations of familiar words. The results reveal that vocalic changes influence word recognition, irrespective of the kinds of vocalic changes made. While consonant changes influenced word recognition in a similar manner, this was restricted to place and manner of articulation changes. Infants did not display sensitivity to voicing changes. Infants' sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations, but not consonant mispronunciations, was influenced by their vocabulary size-infants with larger vocabularies were more sensitive to vowel mispronunciations than infants with smaller vocabularies. The results are discussed in terms of different models attempting to chart the development of acoustically or phonologically specified representations of words during infancy.

Weak semantic context helps phonetic learning in a model of infant language acquisition

“…The collapsed categories are B/P, G/K, D/T, CH/JH, V/F, TH/DH, S/Z, SH/ZH, R/L while HH, M, NG, N, W, Y remain separate phonemes. This dataset mirrors the finding in Mani and Plunkett (2010) that 12 month old infants are not sensitive to voicing mispronunciations.…”

Consonantes, vocales y niveles de especificación en las representaciones fonológicas del primer léxico: una revisión

“…However, a lag in incorporating the voicing dimension on lexical phonological representations has also been described in the literature. Mani and Plunkett (2010) also observed less sensitivity to changes in voicing, compared to changes affecting the other two dimensions that characterize consonantal segments (place and manner of articulation) in a study with 12-month-old participants. A later incorporation of a particular feature (voicing in this case) in the phonological representation of consonants introduces an interesting nuance to the processes of phonological encoding and specification of the early lexicon that deserves further exploration.…”

“…However, research reviewed also indicates that there is room for a range of variability as some under-specification of phonological features has been attested (Altvater-Mackensen et al, 2013). Some changes in the format of representation have been described as the child gets older, sometimes adding to the representations a particular dimension (for example voicing in the case of stop consonants as in Mani and Plunkett, 2010), but also losing one when the dimension initially represented becomes redundant and has no contrastive value any more (for example roundness for English vowels as in .…”

“…The results showed that children were able to detect mispronunciations involving backness and height dimensions, but not roundness 1 . In further work, Mani and Plunkett (2010) studied the phonological representation in familiar words at a younger age (12 months) with the same procedure. They observed that changes in the three vocalic dimensions hindered infant recognition of familiar words, whereas for consonants, infants were only sensitive to changes in place and manner of articulation, but not to voicing.…”

“…Backness becomes a more salient dimension over time, hindering the sensitivity to roundness at older ages. According to Mani and Plunkett (2010) changes in the representation of vowels can occur, from a first stage when acoustic-phonetic detail is encoded, to a second stage in which a more abstract phonological representation is reached and the young learner becomes then more tolerant or flexible to variability. This developmental pattern would occur for both consonants and vowels, but may occur earlier for certain consonant segments and somewhat later for vowels, perhaps due to the greater range of variability in the latter.…”