Variable forms in French-learning toddlers’ lexical representations.

Abstract

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on children's early lexical representations of this frequent intrusion by consonants by testing whether toddlers store multiple forms for vowel-initial words (e.g., téléphant, zéléphant) early in acquisition. Thirty-one Quebec French-learning 30-month-olds completed an eyetracking experiment (16 girls). Children were predominantly from White, middle-class families living in a large urban area (Montreal). Each trial presented two objects while one of them was named. There were four key trial types: (a) correct vowel-initial (e.g., joli éléphant [pretty elephant]); (b) pragmatically incorrect frequent intrusion (e.g., joli zéléphant, /z/ intrusion [pretty elephants], which is grammatically acceptable but does not correspond to the picture); (c) lexically incorrect frequent intrusion (e.g., joli téléphant, /t/ intrusion, as /t/ is a frequent liaison consonant in general but is impossible with joli); (d) lexically incorrect infrequent intrusion (e.g., joli géléphant, /g/ intrusion, as /g/ is an infrequent liaison consonant and is also impossible with joli). The results showed that target recognition was successful in the frequent /t/-and /z/-intrusion trials and was also evident in the vowel-initial trials, whereas it was impeded in the infrequent /g/-intrusion trials. Our findings demonstrate that French-learning children's early lexicon contains multiple variants for words that are subject to phonological alternations, including frequent liaison-consonant variants.

Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

“…Children's linguistic representations are shown to be flexible, such that with increasing experiences with the world, children can not only update the phonological representations of familiar words (e.g., Babineau, Legrand, & Shi, 2021) or word-toreferent mappings (e.g., Berreti et al, 2020;Dautriche et al, 2018;de Carvalho et al, 2021), but also their syntactic expectations (e.g., Havron et al, 2019;. As demonstrated by Havron et al, (2019;, the predictiveness of a syntactic context can change when the child is presented with convincing evidence from recent input, such as that la petite is more frequently followed by a verb than by a noun (whereas it is more often followed by a noun in French child-directed input).…”

When language‐general and language‐specific processes are in conflict: The case of sub‐syllabic word segmentation in toddlers

“…In fact, revising the phonological forms of vowel-initial words that had previously been mis-segmented and mis-stored earlier in development (e.g., ours "bear" mis-segmented and mis-stored as /nuʁs/, /zuʁs/, /tuʁs/) seems to be a slow process. A recent study by Babineau et al (2021) showed that at 30 months, French-learning children's lexicon contains multiple variants for familiar words frequently appearing in liaison contexts, a vowel-initial form and frequent variants (e.g., ours /uʁs/, zours/zuʁs/, tours /tuʁs/ for "bear"). Hence, although the parsing of novel vowel-initial words from variable liaison contexts begins around 24 months of age, previously mis-segmented and mis-stored familiar words continue to remain in the lexicon until a much later age.…”

“…A recent study by Babineau et al. (2021) showed that at 30 months, French‐learning children's lexicon contains multiple variants for familiar words frequently appearing in liaison contexts, a vowel‐initial form and frequent variants (e.g., ours /uʁs/, zours /zuʁs/, tours /tuʁs/ for “bear”). Hence, although the parsing of novel vowel‐initial words from variable liaison contexts begins around 24 months of age, previously mis‐segmented and mis‐stored familiar words continue to remain in the lexicon until a much later age.…”

“…However useful, these strategies do not prevent learners from making mistakes. Some words might be misparsed and wrongly represented in the child's mind (e.g., Babineau et al., 2021), but these errors are expected to be revised as children acquire more experience and refine their linguistic representations. Faced with various and sometimes conflicting segmentation cues, learners need to figure out which cue(s) should be favored in a given context.…”