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Input frequency and lexical variability in phonological development: a survival analysis of word-initial cluster production*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2012

MITSUHIKO OTA  and
SAM J. GREEN
MITSUHIKO OTA*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
SAM J. GREEN
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Address for correspondence: Mitsuhiko Ota, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK. e-mail: mits@ling.ed.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11–4 ; 0). The analysis took account of several lexical factors in addition to lexical input frequency, including the age of first production, production frequency, neighborhood density and number of phonemes. The results showed that lexical input frequency was a significant predictor of the age at which the accuracy level of cluster production in each word first reached 80%. The magnitude of the frequency effect differed across cluster types. Our findings indicate that some of the between-word variance found in the development of sound production can indeed be attributed to the frequency of words in the child's ambient language.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 539 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[*]

The authors wish to thank the JCL editors and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft, Leonid Spektor for adding the d40 option to KWAL to facilitate our CLAN analysis, Filip Smolík for advice on survival analysis, and the audience at the PhonBank workshop 2010 and ICPC 2011 for helpful discussions. All errors are, of course, our own.

References

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