Two-year-olds interpret novel phonological neighbors as familiar words

Abstract

When children hear a novel word in a context presenting a novel object and a familiar one, they usually assume that the novel word refers to the novel object. In a series of experiments, we tested whether this behavior would be found when 2-year-olds interpreted novel words that differed phonologically from familiar words in only 1 sound, either a vowel or consonant. Under these conditions children almost always chose the familiar object, though examination of eye movements showed that children did detect the tested phonological distinctions. Thus, children discounted perceptible phonological variations when doing so permitted a resolution of the speaker's meaning without postulating a new word. Children with larger vocabularies made novel-word interpretations more often than children with smaller vocabularies did. The results suggest that although young children do interpret speech in terms of a learned phonological system, this does not mean that children assume that phonological distinctions imply lexical distinctions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Figure 1

Target-looking proportions in all three experiments. The y-axis gives the average proportion of time children fixated the named target (CP trials, dark bars), or the familiar object (MP trials: lightly shaded bars; nonce trials: striped bars). The MP trials are divided into those with altered consonants (left shaded bar) and those with altered vowels (right shaded bar). Error bars show the standard error of the mean. For each displayed condition, a small horizontal line marks the mean target fixation in the early portion of the trial before the target word was spoken.

Figure 2

Target touching proportions in all three experiments. The y-axis gives the average proportion of time children manually selected the named target (CP trials, dark bars), or the familiar object (MP trials: shaded bars; nonce trials: striped bars). The MP trials are divided into those with altered consonants (left shaded bar) and those with altered vowels (right shaded bar). Error bars show standard error of the mean.

Figure 3

Target-looking and target-touching proportions in all three experiments, split by which quartile each child fell into in total vocabulary size (CDI). Wider bars indicate target looking proportions and narrow bars indicate target touching proportions. Dark bars show performance on correct-pronunciation trials (CP) and lighter bars show performance on mispronunciation trials (MP). Error bars show standard error of the mean by subjects.