CHILDREN PHONOLOGICAL NEIGHBORHOODS - HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL

Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) found smaller phonological similarity neighbourhoods in five- and seven-year-old children's expressive lexicons than in an adult receptive lexicon, a finding they interpreted as evidence that children need not employ fine-grained auditory perceptual analyses in lexical processing. In the present investigation, neighbourhood sizes were calculated for an expressive lexicon derived from two vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1 ; 0 to 3 ; 0 (Rescorla, 1989; Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989). Over 80 % of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbour; nearly 20 % had six or more phonological neighbours. Very young children must have access to reasonably detailed phonological information in order to create and distinguish among such phonologically similar lexical entries.