A perceptual equivalent of the labial-coronal effect in the first year of life

Several studies have investigated infants' acquisition of the phonological (prosodic or phonotactic) regularities of their native language at the lexical level, by showing that infants around 910 months of age start preferring lists of words that have a more versus less frequent phonological structure. The present study investigates whether a similar acquisition pattern of preferences can be found for labial-coronal (LC) words over coronal-labial (CL) words, a bias classically interpreted in terms of production constraints but that could also be explained in terms of relative frequency of frequent LC and less frequent CL words in many languages including French, the language used here. Results show that a preference for bisyllabic LC words emerges between 6 and 10 months of age in French-learning infants (Experiment 1), and that the non-preference at 6 months is not due to the infants' inability to discriminate the two lists of words (Experiment 2). The present study thus establishes an early perceptual equivalent of the LC bias initially found at the onset of word production. Implications of this finding for an understanding of the perception-production relationship are discussed.