Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
7296945 | Journal of Memory and Language | 2016 | 16 Pages |
Abstract
Between the first and the second year of life, children improve in their ability to use phonemic contrasts when learning label-object pairings. This improvement may be related to children's experience with the distribution of phonemes across lexical forms. Because phonemes typically occur in different lexical frames (e.g., /d/ and /t/ in “doggy” and “teddy” rather than “doggy” and “toggy”), familiarity with words makes similar phonemes more distinct through acquired distinctiveness. In a series of simulations, we demonstrate that English input has the distributional characteristics necessary to facilitate use of phonemic contrasts as a function of increasing familiarity with the lexicon. Further, these simulations support a novel prediction: that less common phonemes should take longer to be used productively. We tested this prediction with children between 18 and 25Â months, and found that the relatively infrequent /s/ and /z/ contrast takes longer to emerge than frequent contrasts such as /b/-/d/ or /d/-/t/.
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Authors
Erik D. Thiessen, Philip I. Jr.,