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  • A protracted developmental trajectory for English-learning children’s detection of consonant mispronunciations in newly learned words
Title: A protracted developmental trajectory for English-learning children’s detection of consonant mispronunciations in newly learned words
Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed evidence of learning the taught word. Adults’ target looking was reduced when the novel word was realized at test with a change in the voicing of the initial consonant, but children did not show any such decrement in target fixation. For both children and adults, most learners did not treat the pho- nologically distinct variant as a different word. Acoustic-phonetic variability during teaching did not have consistent effects. Thus, under conditions of intensive short-term training, 24- and 30-month-olds did not differentiate a newly learned word from a variant differing only in consonant voicing. High task complexity during training could explain why mispronunciation detec- tion was weaker here than in some prior studies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1917608
NSF-PAR ID:
10354584
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Language Acquisition
ISSN:
1048-9223
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 21
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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