The lexical advantage: Four-year-old children acquire words, not sounds

Margaret Cychosz; Michelle Erskine; Benjamin Munson; Jan Edwards

doi:10.1017/S0305000920000094

The lexical advantage: Four-year-old children acquire words, not sounds

Margaret Cychosz, Michelle Erskine, Benjamin Munson, Jan Edwards

Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Scopus citations

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 [1sutkes] 'suitcase' and [sudras]). 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.

Original language	English (US)
Journal	Journal of child language
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000920000094
State	Published - Jan 1 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
especially Rebecca Higgins and Michele Liquori. Additional thanks to Sharon Inkelas and two anonymous reviewers for extremely constructive comments. This work benefitted from feedback from audiences at Macquarie University, UC Berkeley, and BUCLD 43. Research was supported by NIDCD Grant No. R01 02932 to J.R.E., B.M., and Mary E. Beckman, a UC Berkeley Dissertation Completion Fellowship to M.C., and the Raymond H. Stetson Scholarship in Phonetics and Speech Science to M.C.

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020.

Keywords

nonword repetition
phonology
vocabulary size

PubMed: MeSH publication types

Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

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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 [1sutkes] 'suitcase' and [sudras]). 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.",

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N2 - 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 [1sutkes] 'suitcase' and [sudras]). 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.

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The lexical advantage: Four-year-old children acquire words, not sounds

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

PubMed: MeSH publication types

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