Recognition of Familiar Wordforms and Phonological Variation in Akan by Multilingual Infants Learning African Tone...

Recent developmental evidence shows that the proposal that consonants are more important than vowels for lexical processing is not universal but language-specific. In non-tone languages, a consonant bias emerges early in development in Romance languages (e.g., French) but later in Germanic languages (e.g., English), while evidence from Asian tone languages (Mandarin, Cantonese) shows a reverse vowel bias. The V-bias in tone languages has been linked to the presence of lexical tones-mainly carried by vowels-which may increase vowel prominence. The present study tests the hypothesis that a V-bias is more generally found in tone languages by examining infants learning an understudied African tone language, Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo). More specifically, we tested Akan-learning multilingual infants (11-14 months) in Ghana (Sub-Saharan Africa) in a wordform recognition task, using a central fixation procedure. After establishing that these infants preferred familiar Akan words over pseudowords (Experiment 1), Experiment 2 assessed whether one-feature consonant or vowel mispronunciations of these words would differentially block recognition, indicative of a V-bias. Infants showed comparable sensitivity to consonant and vowel mispronunciations, failing to establish a bias in these infants. Both findings were not modulated by age and relative exposure to Akan (and also relative exposure to tone languages in Experiment 2). Our findings add to existing evidence that early lexical processing is language-specific. They also suggest that the emergence of a V-bias in tone languages may depend on tone complexity and developmental age.