Tania S. Zamuner

The structure and nature of phonological neighbourhoods in children's early lexicons*

This research examines phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicons of children acquiring English. Analyses of neighbourhood densities were done on childrens earliest words and on a corpus of spontaneous speech, used to measure neighbours in the target language. Neighbourhood densities were analyzed for words created by changing segments in word-onset position (rhyme neighbours as in pin/bin), vowel position (consonant neighbours as in pin/pan/) and word-offset position (lead neighbours as in pin/pit). Results indicated that neighbours in childrens early lexicons are significantly more often distinguished in word-onset position (rhyme neighbours) and significantly less often distinguished in word-offset position (lead neighbours). Moreover, patterns in child language are more extreme than in the target language. Findings are discussed within the PRIMIR framework (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interaction Representations; Werker & Curtin, 2005). It is argued that early perceptual sensitivity aids lexical acquisition, supporting continuity across speech perception and lexical acquisition.

Understanding the developing sound system: interactions between sounds and words

UNLABELLED Over the course of the first 2 years of life, infants are learning a great deal about the sound system of their native language. Acquiring the sound system requires the infant to learn about sounds and their distributions, sound combinations, and prosodic information, such as syllables, rhythm, and stress. These aspects of the phonological system are being learned simultaneously as the infant experiences the language around him or her. What binds all of the phonological units is the context in which they occur, namely, words. In this review, we explore the development of phonetics and phonology by showcasing the interactive nature of the developing lexicon and sound system with a focus on perception. We first review seminal research in the foundations of phonological development. We then discuss early word recognition and learning followed by a discussion of phonological and lexical representations. We conclude by discussing the interactive nature of lexical and phonological representations and highlight some further directions for exploring the developing sound system. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:589-602. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1307 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

NICKNAMES AND THE LEXICON OF SPORTS

This article examines the structure and usage of nicknames given to professional hockey and baseball players. Two general types are observed: a phrasal referring expression and a single-word hypocoristic. The phrasal nickname is descrip- tive but is only used referentially, usually in sports narrative. The hypocoristic is used for both reference and address and may be descriptive or shortened from a formal name. In addition, its inclusion of a hypocoristic suffix is sensitive to the segmental content of the shortened form. A model of nickname assignment is proposed in which the creation of any kind of nickname is treated as enriching the lexicon. This model relates nicknames to other types of specialized or elaborate referring expres- sions and encodes the social meaning of nicknames and other informal names in the lexicon. The tradition of assigning nicknames to athletes is typical of all sports and is notably vibrant in baseball and hockey. Indeed, nicknaming practices are prevalent in many cultures and subcultures, carrying a wide range of social and semantic functions, and are often derived with specialized phonological structures. In this article, we study the athlete nickname as both a cultural and a linguistic phenomenon, focusing both on its function as a potential form of address and reference and on its form as a descriptive or shortened label. Like nicknames discussed in the studies surveyed in section 1 below, athlete nicknames carry social meaning about their referents; in many cases, they are also constrained in their phonological structure. Athlete nicknames form in various ways. There are phrasal nicknames such as The Sultan of Swat, The Chicoutimi Cucumber, and The Finnish Flash, which typically use vivid imagery and wordplay such as alliteration and rhyme to provide a near-literary description of the referent. But there are also shorter, vivid monikers, such as Babe, Boomboom, or Rocket, as well as short nicknames simply derived from the referents forename or surname, such as Alfie, Mac, or Smitty. The wealth of examples invites a number of serious questions. What purposes do nicknames serve? Why are some long and phrasal, while oth- ers are brief? What intuitions do users have about creating new nicknames? To begin answering these questions, we adopt a broad working definition

Phonotactics and morphophonology in early child language: Evidence from Dutch

This research investigates childrens knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]~[pɛtən] (cap~caps) but does in [bɛt]~[bɛdən] (bed~beds). Data from the first experiment showed that children at a younger age were less accurate at imitating words with /d/ than /t/, regardless of morphological context. In a second study, children between 2 and 4 years were asked to produce singulars from novel plurals (e.g., [kɛtən]~[kɛt] and [kɛdən]~[kɛt]). Results indicated that childrens performance was better in contexts that did not require surface variation. Dutch-learning children are not able to robustly generalize their knowledge of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Rather, it appears that their knowledge is more concrete, in line with recent usage-based theories of acquisition.

Infants’ Discrimination of Consonants: Interplay Between Word Position and Acoustic Saliency

ABSTRACT Research has shown that young infants use contrasting acoustic information to distinguish consonants. This has been used to argue that by 12 months, infants have homed in on their native language sound categories. However, this ability seems to be positionally constrained, with contrasts at the beginning of words (onsets) discriminated earlier. This study explores whether English-learning 12- and 20-month-olds discriminate coda consonants in word-final and word-medial positions. The 12-month-old group successfully discriminated place of articulation contrasts for voiced stops in word-final position, though not voiceless stops in either position, while the older infants discriminated place of articulation contrasts for both voiced and voiceless stops in both positions. This indicates that voiced stops may be more acoustically salient than voiceless, and that position influences discrimination. Our findings support the claim that infants build speech sound categories starting with more salient contrasts in strong positions, which expand to other positions over the course of development.

Infants Track Word Forms in Early Word-Object Associations.

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, 1984; Smith, 2000). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar word form will lead young word learners to look for an object to associate with it (Juscyzk, 1997). This research investigates the relative weighing of word forms and objects in early word-object associations using the anticipatory eye-movement paradigm (AEM; McMurray & Aslin, 2004). Eighteen-month-old infants and adults were taught novel word-object associations and then tested on ambiguous stimuli that pitted word forms and objects against each other. Results revealed a change in weighing of these components across development. For 18-month-old infants, word forms weighed more in early word-object associative learning, while for adults, objects were more salient. Our results suggest that infants preferentially use word forms to guide the process of word-object association.

Production facilitates lexical acquisition in young children

Recent research in language acquisition argues that production plays a unique role in the acquisition of phonological and lexical representations [Fikkert. In press, LabPhonX]. In this research, we investigate the effect of production in early lexical acquisition. Twenty Dutch‐learning children participated in a word‐learning task, where children were taught and asked to imitate non‐words. Children were then tested on their recall of the non‐words, and their receptive knowledge of the non‐words. Children’s performance on the two tasks was compared to whether they imitated the non‐words during training, the number of times they imitated the non‐words, and the accuracy of their imitations. While no effect of production during training was found on children’s receptive knowledge of the non‐words, production during training was associated with children’s ability to recall the non‐words. Specifically, children who produced the non‐words during training were more likely to recall the non‐words at test. No relat...

Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced

This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old childrens recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a blocked design. Immediately after training, children were tested on their recognition of the trained novel words using a preferential looking paradigm. In both experiments, children recognized novel words that were produced and heard during training, but demonstrated better recognition for items that were heard. These findings are opposite to previous results reported in the literature with adults and children. Our results show that benefits of speech production for word learning are dependent on factors such as task complexity and the developmental stage of the learner.

Stepping backwards in development: integrating developmental speech perception with lexical and phonological development - a commentary on Stoel-Gammon's 'Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children '*

Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological development, wemust consider relations between multiple subfields. That is, by examining the interactions between these subfields, a greater understanding of lexical and phonological development can emerge. For instance, the interaction between phonology, syntax and semantics is demonstrated in recent work looking at how phonological patterns can provide a basis for inferring a word’s lexical category (such as nouns and verbs) (Christiansen, Onnis & Hockema, 2009; Lany & Saffran, 2010). Stoel-Gammon provides an extensive overview of data from developmental speech production to establish the relationship between lexical and phonological development. Numerous studies demonstrate that phonological patterning is one factor that determines which words are produced and learned by children. A range of findings provide evidence for this factor, such as studies examining the connection between children’s prelinguistic and later word productions (Vihman, 1992) and studies comparing phonological distributions in children’s early lexicons to children’s production accuracy (Stoel-Gammon, 1998). A wealth of knowledge can be gathered from the studies that Stoel-Gammon reviews. Speech production studies in particular, have provided linguists with a solid foundation of how the phonological system develops in conjunction with the acquisition of words. However, to fully understand lexical and phonological acquisition, it is essential that we also take a step back in development. We also need to consider findings in related fields such as infant speech perception and look