The emerging lexicon of children with phonological delays: phonotactic constraints and probability in acquisition

The effects of phonotactic constraints (i.e., the status of a sound as correctly or incorrectly articulated) and phonotactic probability (i.e., the likelihood of a sound sequence) on lexical acquisition have been investigated independently. This study investigated the interactive influence of phonotactic constraints and phonotactic probability on lexical acquisition in 3 groups of children: children with functional phonological delays (PD), phonology-matched, younger, typically developing children (PM), and age-/vocabulary-matched typically developing peers (AVM). Sixty-eight children participated in a multitrial word-learning task involving nonwords varying in phonotactic constraints (IN vs. OUT) and phonotactic probability (common vs. rare). Correct and error responses were analyzed. Results indicated that OUT sound sequences were learned more rapidly than IN sound sequences. This suggests that OUT sounds may be salient because they represent only a small subset of the child's sound system. The effect of phonotactic probability varied across groups: Children with PD showed a common sound sequence disadvantage, younger PM children showed a common sound sequence advantage, and AVM children showed no effect. Moreover, error analyses indicated that children with PD had particular difficulty creating lexical representations and associations between lexical and semantic representations when learning common sound sequences. Children with PD may rely more heavily on lexical representations to learn new words or may have difficulty learning common sound sequences because of the high degree of similarity between these sequences and other known words. Finally, the effect of phonotactic probability was consistent across IN and OUT sound sequences, suggesting that the lexical representation of both correctly articulated and misarticulated words is based on the adult-target pronunciation.