Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-4ws75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-06T15:20:22.237Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Building phonological lexical representations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2015

Suzanne V. H. van der Feest  and
Paula Fikkert
Suzanne V. H. van der Feest*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
Paula Fikkert*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen
*
E-mail: suzanne@austin.utexas.edu
E-mail: p.fikkert@let.ru.nl.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how much detail young children's word representations contain. We investigate early representations of place of articulation and voicing contrasts, inspired by previously attested asymmetrical patterns in children's early word productions. We tested Dutch-learning 20- and 24-month-olds’ perception of these fundamentally different contrasts in a mispronunciation-detection paradigm. Our results show that different kinds and directions of phonological changes yield different effects. Both 20- and 24-month-olds noticed coronal mispronunciations of labials, but not vice versa. The 24-month-olds noticed voiced mispronunciations of voiceless stops, but not vice versa, while the 20-month-olds failed to notice any voicing mispronunciations. We argue that early lexical representations are specified in very systematic ways, that not all phonological contrasts are encoded at the same time and that the phonological system of a language determines which contrasts are specified first in the representations of early words.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 207 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by NWO (Dutch NSF) grant 360-70-100, awarded to Paula Fikkert and René Kager. All experiments were conducted in the Nijmegen Baby Research Center, supported by the NWO Spinoza grant ‘Native and non-native listening’, awarded to Anne Cutler. We thank Angela Khadar and the rest of the Nijmegen Baby Research Center staff, as well as all participating parents and children for their assistance in the completion of this study. We thank Fieke Noordzij for her help with recordings, Christopher Fennell, and four anonymous reviewers for comments on previous versions of this manuscript. This research was completed as part of the first author's PhD dissertation.

References

Alphen, Petra M. van (2004). Perceptual relevance of prevoicing in Dutch. PhD dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Alphen, Petra M. van & Smits, Roel (2004). Acoustical and perceptual analysis of the voicing distinction in Dutch initial plosives: the role of prevoicing. JPh 32. 455–491.Google Scholar
Altvater-Mackensen, Nicole, van der Feest, Suzanne V. H. & Fikkert, Paula (2014). Asymmetries in early word recognition: the case of stops and fricatives. Language Learning and Development 10. 149–178.Google Scholar
Aslin, Richard N., Pisoni, David B., Hennessy, Beth L. & Perey, Alan J. (1981). Discrimination of voice onset time by human infants: new findings and implications for the effects of early experience. Child Development 52. 1135–1145.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bailey, Todd M. & Plunkett, Kim (2002). Phonological specificity in early words. Cognitive Development 17. 1265–1282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barlow, Jessica A. & Gierut, Judith A. (1999). Optimality Theory in phonological acquisition. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 42. 1482–1498.Google Scholar
Bergelson, Elika & Swingley, Daniel (2012). At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109. 3253–3258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Booij, Geert (1995). The phonology of Dutch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Cho, Taehong & Ladefoged, Peter (1999). Variation and universals in VOT: evidence from 18 languages. JPh 27. 207–229.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (2001). Representational economy in constraint-based phonology. In Hall, T. Alan (ed.) Distinctive feature theory. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 71–146.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (2003). Feature economy in sound systems. Phonology 20. 287–333.Google Scholar
Cutler, Anne & Clifton, Charles C. Jr. (1999). Comprehending spoken language: a blueprint of the listener. In Brown, Colin M. & Hagoort, Peter (eds.) The neurocognition of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 123–166.Google Scholar
Davis, Barbara L. & MacNeilage, Peter F. (2000). An embodiment perspective on the acquisition of speech perception. Phonetica 57. 229–241.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dresher, B. Elan (2009). The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eimas, Peter D., Siqueland, Einar R., Jusczyk, Peter & Vigorito, James (1971). Speech perception in infants. Science 171. 303–306.Google Scholar
Eulitz, Carsten & Lahiri, Aditi (2004). Neurobiological evidence for abstract phonological representations in the mental lexicon during speech recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16. 577–583.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feest, Suzanne V. H. van der (2004). Acquiring voicing in Dutch: the role of function words. In Cornips, Leonie & Doetjes, Jenny (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands 2004. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 47–57.Google Scholar
Feest, Suzanne V. H. van der (2007). Building a phonological lexicon: the acquisition of the Dutch voicing contrast in perception and production. PhD dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Fennell, Christopher T. (2012). Object familiarity enhances infants’ use of phonetic detail in novel words. Infancy 17. 339–353.Google Scholar
Fennell, Christopher T. & Waxman, Sandra R. (2010). What paradox? Referential cues allow for infant use of phonetic detail in word learning. Child Development 81. 1376–1383.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fenson, Larry, Dale, Phillip S., Reznick, J. Steven, Thal, Donna, Bates, Elizabeth, Hartung, J. P., Pethick, Stephen J. & Reilly, Judy S. (1993). The MacArthur communicative development inventories: user's guide and technical manual. San Diego: Singular.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A. & Farwell, Carol B. (1975). Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Lg 51. 419–439.Google Scholar
Fernald, Anne, Zangl, Renate, Portillo, Ana Luiz & Marchman, Virginia A. (2008). Looking while listening: using eye movements to monitor spoken language comprehension by infants and young children. In Sekerina, Irina A., Fernández, Eva M. & Clahsen, Harald (eds.) Developmental psycholinguistics: on-line methods in children's language processing. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 97–135.Google Scholar
Fikkert, Paula (2005). Getting sounds structures in mind: acquisition bridging linguistics and psychology? In Cutler, Anne (ed.) Twenty-first century psycholinguistics: four cornerstones. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. 43–56.Google Scholar
Fikkert, Paula (2007). Acquiring phonology. In de Lacy, Paul (ed.) The Cambridge handbook of phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 537–554.Google Scholar
Fikkert, Paula & C. Levelt, Clara (2008). How does Place fall into place? The lexicon and emergent constraints in children's developing phonological grammar. In Avery, Peter, Dresher, B. Elan & Rice, Keren (eds.) Contrast in phonology: theory, perception, acquisition. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 231–268.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick, Hirsch-Pasek, Kathryn, Cauley, Kathleen M. & Gordon, Laura (1987). The eyes have it: lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm. Journal of Child Language 14. 23–45.Google Scholar
Hallé, Pierre A. & de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte (1996). The format of representation of recognized words in infants early receptive lexicon. Infant Behavior and Development 19. 463–481.Google Scholar
Hollich, George (2005). Supercoder: a program for coding preferential looking (version 10.5). Software package. Available (May 2015) at http://hincapie.psych.purdue.edu/Splitscreen/.Google Scholar
Ingram, David (1974). Phonological rules in young children. Journal of Child Language 1. 49–64.Google Scholar
Iverson, Gregory K. & Salmons, Joseph C. (1995). Aspiration and laryngeal representation in Germanic. Phonology 12. 369–396.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman (1941). Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Translated 1968 by Keiler, Allan R. as Child language, aphasia and phonological universals. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
Johnson, Elizabeth K. (2005). English-learning infants’ representations of word forms with iambic stress. Infancy 7. 99–109.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, Peter W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, Peter W. & Aslin, Richard N. (1995). Infants’ detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology 29. 1–23.Google Scholar
Kager, René, van der Feest, Suzanne V. H., Fikkert, Paula, Kerkhoff, Annemarie & Zamuner, Tania S. (2007). Representations of [voice]: evidence from acquisition. In van de Weijer, Jeroen & van der Torre, Erik Jan (eds.) Voicing in Dutch: (De)voicing – phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 41–80.Google Scholar
Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (2004). Introduction: constraints in phonological acquisition. In Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–53.Google Scholar
Kehoe, Margaret M., Lleó, Conxita & Rakow, Martin (2004). Voice onset time in bilingual German-Spanish children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7. 71–88.Google Scholar
Kuhl, Patricia K., Andruski, Jean E., Chistovich, Inna A., Chistovich, Ludmilla A., Kozhevnikova, Elena V., Ryskina, Viktoria L., Stolyarova, Elvira I., Sundberg, Ulla & Lacerda, Francisco (1997). Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science 277. 684–686.Google Scholar
Kuijpers, Cecile T. L. (1996). Perception of the voicing contrast by Dutch children and adults. JPh 24. 367–382.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Aditi & Marslen-Wilson, William (1991). The mental representation of lexical form: a phonological approach to the recognition lexicon. Cognition 38. 245–294.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Aditi & Reetz, Henning (2002). Underspecified recognition. In Gussenhoven, Carlos & Warner, Natasha (eds.) Laboratory Phonology 7. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 637–675.Google Scholar
Levelt, Clara C. (1994). On the acquisition of place. PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.Google Scholar
McClelland, James L. & Elman, Jeffrey L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology 18. 1–86.Google Scholar
Mani, Nivedita & Plunkett, Kim (2007). Phonological specificity of vowels and consonants in early lexical representations. Journal of Memory and Language 57. 252–272.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, William D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition. Cognition 25. 71–102.Google Scholar
Maye, Jessica, Werker, Janet F. & Gerken, LouAnn (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition 82. B101–B111.Google Scholar
Nazzi, Thierry (2005). Use of phonetic specificity during the acquisition of new words: differences between consonants and vowels. Cognition 98. 13–30.Google Scholar
Paradis, Carole & Prunet, Jean-François (1989). On coronal transparency. Phonology 6. 317–348.Google Scholar
Paradis, Carole & Prunet, Jean-François (eds.) (1991). The special status of coronals: internal and external evidence. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe, Stager, Christine L. & Werker, Janet F. (2004). The perceptual acquisition of phonological contrasts. Lg 80. 384–402.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe & Werle, Adam (2003). Direction of assimilation in child consonant harmony. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48. 385–408.Google Scholar
Quam, Carolyn & Swingley, Daniel (2010). Phonological knowledge guides 2-year-olds’ and adults’ interpretation of salient pitch contours in word learning. Journal of Memory and Language 62. 135–150.Google Scholar
Rice, Keren (1996). Default variability: the coronal–velar relationship. NLLT 14. 493–543.Google Scholar
Rose, Yvan (2000). Headedness and prosodic licensing in the L1 acquisition of phonology. PhD dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Rose, Yvan & Inkelas, Sharon (2011). The interpretation of phonological patterns in first language acquisition. In van Oostendorp, Marc, Ewen, Colin J., Hume, Elizabeth & Rice, Keren (eds.) The Blackwell companion to phonology. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. 2414–2438.Google Scholar
Smith, Neilson V. (1973). The acquisition of phonology: a case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smits, Roel, Warner, Natasha, McQueen, James M. & Cutler, Anne (2003). Unfolding of phonetic information over time: a database of Dutch diphone perception. JASA 113. 563–574.Google Scholar
Stager, Christine L. & Werker, Janet F. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks. Nature 6640. 381–382.Google Scholar
Stevens, K. N. & Blumstein, S. E. (1978). Invariant cues for place of articulation in stop consonants. JASA 64. 1358–1368.Google Scholar
Swingley, Daniel (2003). Phonetic detail in the developing lexicon. Language and Speech 46. 265–294.Google Scholar
Swingley, Daniel (2005). 11-month-olds’ knowledge of how familiar words sound. Developmental Science 8. 432–443.Google Scholar
Swingley, Daniel (2010). Fast mapping and slow mapping in children's word learning. Language Learning and Development 6. 179–183.Google Scholar
Swingley, Daniel & Aslin, Richard N. (2000). Spoken word recognition and lexical representation in very young children. Cognition 76. 147–166.Google Scholar
Swingley, Daniel & Aslin, Richard N. (2002). Lexical neighborhoods and word-form representations of 14-month-olds. Psychological Science 13. 480–484.Google Scholar
Van de Velde, Hans & van Hout, Roeland (2001). The devoicing of fricatives in a reading task. In van der Wouden, Ton & Broekhuis, Hans (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands 2001. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 219–229.Google Scholar
Vihman, Marilyn M., Nakai, Satsuki, DePaolis, Rory A. & Hallé, Pierre A. (2004). The role of accentual pattern in early lexical representation. Journal of Memory and Language 50. 336–353.Google Scholar
Werker, Janet F. (1995). Exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech perception. In Gleitman, Lila R. & Liberman, Mark (eds.) Language. 2nd edn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 87–106.Google Scholar
Werker, Janet F. & Curtin, Suzanne (2005). PRIMIR: a developmental framework of infant speech processing. Language Learning and Development 1. 197–234.Google Scholar
Werker, Janet F., Fennell, Christopher T., Corcoran, Kathleen M. & Stager, Christine L. (2002). Infants’ ability to learn phonetically similar words: effects of age and vocabulary size. Infancy 3. 1–30.Google Scholar
White, Katherine S. & Morgan, James L. (2008). Sub-segmental detail in early lexical representations. Journal of Memory and Language 59. 114–132.Google Scholar
Yoshida, Katherine A., Fennell, Christopher T., Swingley, Daniel & Werker, Janet F. (2009). Fourteen-month-old infants learn similar sounding words. Developmental Science 12. 412–418.Google Scholar
Zamuner, Tania S. (2006). Sensitivity to word-final phonotactics in 9- to 16-month-old infants. Infancy 10. 77–95.Google Scholar
Zink, Inge & Lejaegere, Maryline (2002). N-CDIs: lijsten voor communicatieve ontwikkeling. Aanpassing en hernormering van de MacArthur CDIs van Fenson et al. Leuven: Acco.Google Scholar