ORCID
- Floccia, Caroline: 0000-0003-3931-9791
- Goslin, Jeremy: 0000-0001-7894-1140
Abstract
Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this ambiguity by using an interactive word-learning study similar to that used in French, with British-English-learning toddlers aged 1;4 and 1;11. Children were taught two CVC labels differing on either a consonant or vowel and tested on their pairing of a third object named with one of the previously taught labels, or part of them. In concert with previous research on British-English toddlers, our results provided no evidence of a general consonant bias. The language-specific mechanisms explaining the differential status for consonants and vowels in lexical development are discussed.
DOI
10.1017/S0305000913000287
Publication Date
2014-09-01
Publication Title
J Child Lang
Volume
41
Issue
5
Organisational Unit
School of Psychology
Keywords
Child Language, Child, Preschool, Female, Humans, Infant, Language, Language Development, Learning, Male, Phonetics
First Page
1085
Last Page
1114
Recommended Citation
Floccia, C., Nazzi, T., Delle, L., Poltrock, S., & Goslin, J. (2014) 'English-learning one- to two-year-olds do not show a consonant bias in word learning.', J Child Lang, 41(5), pp. 1085-1114. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000913000287
