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Phonetic detail in the developing lexicon
1Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, USA. swingley@psych.upenn.edu
Language and Speech
|January 30, 2004
Summary
Nineteen-month-old infants demonstrate an understanding of word sound forms, even when encountering mispronunciations. This research highlights early phonetic encoding in young children
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Speech Perception
Background:
- Infants possess a notable sensitivity to phonetic variations in speech.
- However, young children do not always appear to utilize this sensitivity in early language acquisition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess 19-month-old Dutch infants' knowledge of word sound forms.
- To investigate whether infants can detect mispronunciations in familiar words.
Main Methods:
- A visual fixation task was employed with 19-month-old Dutch infants.
- Infants were presented with picture pairs and heard correct or mispronounced familiar words.
- Mispronunciations involved word-initial or word-medial consonant substitutions ([d] or [g]).
Main Results:
- Infants showed better word recognition for correct pronunciations compared to mispronunciations.
- This effect was consistent regardless of whether the mispronunciation was word-initial or word-medial.
- Performance was not influenced by the presence of lexical or nonlexical phonological neighbors.
Conclusions:
- The findings suggest that 19-month-old infants encode phonetic detail in familiar words.
- This indicates an early sensitivity to the precise sound structure of language.
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