Phonological Specificity of Vowels and Consonants in
Early Lexical Representations
Nivedita Mani *,
Kim Plunkett
Reviewed by IFTI LUTHVIANA DEWI
This
research investigated infants’ sensitivity to vowels in lexical representations.
There are two experiments, the first examines whether infants at 15, 18 and 24
months are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words. The
second compares 15, 18 and 24-month-olds’ sensitivity to consonant and vowel
mispronunciations of familiar words.
The
participants in this experiment were 28 infants at 15 months, 30 infants at 18
months and 31 infants at 24 months. The stimuli presented to infants at 18 and
24 months were 16 monosyllabic (CVC) nouns taken from the OCDI. Each infant
heard eight labels, were correctly pronounced while the other half were incorrectly
pronounced. While, Infants at 15 months were tested on a slightly different set
of 10 monosyllabic (CVC) words.
This
study found that Infants become selectively sensitive to phonological
distinctions relevant to their native language at an early age.
Early
lexical representations of familiar words contain suitable information for very
young English infants to detect mispronunciations. The results from the three age
groups (15, 18 and 24 months) tested indicate that this vowel sensitivity is in
place by 15-months-old. These findings also found the first experimental
evidence that vowel identity makes lexical access for a wide range of
monosyllabic, familiar words at an early stage of lexical development.
The
findings eliminate the possibility that consonants play a more essential role
than vowels in lexical processing in infancy, at least in recognition of
familiar words at 18 months of age. Both consonants and vowels limit lexical
recognition equally in the last half of the second year of life.
The
role of vowels in lexical recognition in infancy:
·
The importance
of vowels in lexical representation are depending upon additional empirical
validation of the strength of vowel mispronunciation effects in the recognition
of novel and familiar words, and mono- and bisyllabic words.
·
Exploration of
cross-linguistic factors influence the understanding of the role of vowels in lexical
access.
Infants
were sensitive to changes to the vowels
of the words presented to them. Yet, there are likely to be vowel–consonant co-articulation
effects that might lead to significant differences in the acoustic characteristics
of the consonant between the correctly pronounced and mispronounced words.
Infant
performance might have been triggered by the acoustic differences in the co-articulated
consonants between the correct and incorrect pronunciations rather than because
of the changes to the vowels themselves.
On
this interpretation of the results, sensitivity to mispronunciations would be
led by differences in the acoustic characteristics of the consonant and not the
vowel. While this suggests a less essential role for vowels in lexical
representation, there is no empirical evidence suggesting that infants’
performance is dependent on the acoustic characteristics of the co-articulated consonant
alone.
