Phonological specificity in early words

被引:128
作者
Bailey, TM [1 ]
Plunkett, K [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Oxford, Dept Expt Psychol, Oxford OX1 2JD, England
基金
英国生物技术与生命科学研究理事会;
关键词
phonological specificity; young children; lexical representation; auditory word recognition; speech perception; phoneme development;
D O I
10.1016/S0885-2014(02)00116-8
中图分类号
B844 [发展心理学(人类心理学)];
学科分类号
040202 ;
摘要
Young children often fail to distinguish words differing by a single phoneme. It has been suggested that the phonological representations associated with early words are under- specified, with detail being added either as required to distinguish more words as a child's vocabulary increases, or as a function of the amount of exposure a child has had to a particular word. We report on an inter-modal preferential looking task in which 48, 18- and 24-month-olds heard either accurate pronunciations of picture names or slight (1- or 2-feature) mispronunciations. Each child was tested on four words that they learned at a very young age, and four words they had learned only recently relative to the test session. Across all children, 30 different words were tested. Analysis of children's looking behavior found differences between their responses to accurate and inaccurate pronunciations. These results show that toddlers' representations for words have enough detail to detect even slight mispronunciations. This ability was unaffected by their age, the size of their receptive vocabulary, the neighborhood density of individual test words, or the recency with which words had been learned. The results suggest that the specificity of lexical representations may be unrelated to any of these factors, at least within the range of ages and word familiarity examined in this study. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
引用
收藏
页码:1265 / 1282
页数:18
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