Phonological neighborhood measures and multisyllabic word acquisition in children

Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted positive association between CVC word acquisition and neighborhood density, no similar relationship was found for multisyllabic words, despite testing multiple novel neighborhood measures. This finding raises the intriguing possibility that phonological organization of the mental lexicon may play a fundamentally different role in the acquisition of more complex words.