Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters

Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label because its neighbor dog is also an object. In three experiments, French 18-month-olds were taught novel words whose word forms were phonologically similar to familiar nouns (noun-neighbors), to familiar verbs (verb-neighbors) or to nothing (no-neighbors). Toddlers successfully learned the no-neighbors and verb-neighbors but failed to learn the noun-neighbors, although both novel neighbors had a familiar phonological neighbor in the toddlers' lexicon. We conclude that when creating a novel lexical entry, toddlers' evaluation of similarity in the lexicon is multidimensional, incorporating both phonological and semantic or syntactic features.