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Does size matter? Subsegmental cues to vowel mispronunciation detection*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2010

NIVEDITA MANI  and
KIM PLUNKETT
NIVEDITA MANI*
Affiliation:
University of Göttingen
KIM PLUNKETT
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Address for correspondence: Nivedita Mani, Free-Floater (Junior) Research Group, ‘Language Acquisition’, University of Göttingen, Gosslerstrasse, 14, 37073 Göttingen. e-mail: nmani@gwdg.de
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Abstract

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words, by testing children's sensitivity to 1-feature, 2-feature and 3-feature mispronunciations of the vowels of familiar labels: Children aged 1 ; 6 did not show a graded sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations, even when the trial length was increased to allow them more time to form a response. Two-year-olds displayed a robust sensitivity to increases in vowel mispronunciation size, differentiating between small and large mispronunciations. While this suggests that early lexical representations contain information about the features contributing to vocalic identity, we present evidence that this graded sensitivity is better explained by the acoustic characteristics of the different mispronunciation types presented to children.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 606 - 627
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by an ESRC grant RES-000-23-1322 awarded to Kim Plunkett.

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