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A lexical advantage in four-year-old children's word repetition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2020

Margaret CYCHOSZ ,
Michelle ERSKINE ,
Benjamin MUNSON  and
Jan EDWARDS
Margaret CYCHOSZ*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Michelle ERSKINE
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
Benjamin MUNSON
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Jan EDWARDS
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
*
*Corresponding author: Margaret Cychosz, 1203 Dwinelle Hall, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. E-mail: mcychosz@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

This study examined a potential lexicality advantage in young children's early speech production: do children produce sound sequences less accurately in nonwords than real words? Children aged 3;3-4;4 completed two tasks: a real word repetition task and a corresponding nonword repetition task. Each of the 23 real words had a paired consonant-vowel sequence in the nonword in word-initial position (e.g., ‘su’ in [ˈsutkes] ‘suitcase’ and [ˈsudrɑs]). The word-initial consonant-vowel sequences were kept constant between the paired words. Previous work on this topic compared different sequences of paired sounds, making it hard to determine if those results were due to a lexical or phonetic effect. Our results show that children reliably produced consonant-vowel sequences in real words more accurately than nonwords. The effect was most pronounced in children with smaller receptive vocabularies. Together, these results reinforce theories arguing for interactions between vocabulary size and phonology in language development.

Keywords

phonologynonword repetitionvocabulary size
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 31 - 54
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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