Using Distributional Statistics to Acquire Morphophonological Alternations: Evidence from Production and Perception

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Linguistics
• Phonology

Background:

• Morphophonological alternations, specifically voicing alternations due to final-devoicing in Dutch, present acquisition challenges for children.
• Previous research attributed these difficulties to unpredictability, but adults utilize phonological context for prediction.
• This study explores the predictability within child-directed speech and children's ability to leverage these patterns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if voicing alternations in Dutch are predictable from the child's linguistic input.
• To determine if young children can utilize predictable phonological information in their input.
• To assess children's sensitivity to distributional statistics in production and perception tasks.

Main Methods:

• A corpus analysis of child-directed speech was conducted to identify phonological predictability of stem-final obstruent alternations.
• Experiment 1 involved a plural-elicitation task with 3-year-old Dutch children to assess production accuracy.
• Experiment 2 used a Preferential Looking Task to evaluate children's sensitivity to voicing mispronunciations.

Main Results:

• The corpus study confirmed some predictability of stem-final obstruent alternations based on phonological stem properties.
• Experiment 1 demonstrated that 3-year-olds' production accuracy was influenced by these distributional statistics.
• Experiment 2 found that distributional properties did not affect children's sensitivity to voicing mispronunciations in the Preferential Looking Task.

Conclusions:

• Dutch voicing alternations are partially predictable from child-directed speech input.
• Children's acquisition of these alternations is sensitive to distributional patterns, particularly in production.
• Sensitivity to predictable patterns differs across tasks, suggesting complex developmental mechanisms for processing morphophonological alternations.