ORCID
- Caroline Floccia: 0000-0003-3931-9791
- Jeremy Goslin: 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.
Publication Date
2014-01-01
Publication Title
J Child Lang
Volume
41
Issue
5
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: 10.1017/S0305000913000287
