Spanish-learning infants switch from a vowel to a consonant bias during the first year of life

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology Vol. 221; p. 105444
• Main Authors: Bouchon, Camillia, Hochmann, Jean-Rémy, Toro, Juan M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.09.2022; Elsevier
• Subjects: Consonant bias; Humanities and Social Sciences; Infancy; Input-specific mechanism of lexical acquisition; lexical processing; Linguistics; Psychology; Romance languages; Word recognition; Word recognition; Infancy; Input-specific mechanism of lexical acquisition; lexical processing; Romance languages; Consonant bias
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105444

•Adults use consonants more than vowels in words, andthe development of this consonant bias varies cross linguistically.•Spanish infants ‘use of consonants vs. vowels in word recognition was assessed at 5, 8.5 and 12 months of age.•As for Italian and French, the consonant bias emerges during the first year of life in this third Romance language.•Therefore, specific factors common to Romance languages may be driving an early consonant bias in lexical processing.•This study contributes to a better understanding of how language specific factors impact infants’ quest for words. The consonant bias is evidenced by a greater reliance on consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Although attested during adulthood for most Roman and Germanic languages (e.g., French, Italian, English, Dutch), evidence on its development suggests that the native input modulates its trajectory. French and Italian learners exhibit an early switch from a higher reliance on vowels at 5 and 6 months of age to a consonant bias by the end of the first year. This study investigated the developmental trajectory of this bias in a third Romance language unexplored so far—Spanish. In a central visual fixation procedure, infants aged 5, 8½, and 12 months were tested in a word recognition task. In Experiment 1, infants preferred listening to frequent words (e.g., leche, milk) over nonwords (e.g., machi) at all ages. Experiment 2 assessed infants’ listening times to consonant and vowel alterations of the words used in Experiment 1. Here, 5-month-olds preferred listening to consonant alterations, whereas 12-month-olds preferred listening to vowel alterations, suggesting that 5-month-olds’ recognition performance was more affected by a vowel alteration (e.g., leche →lache), whereas 12-month-olds’ recognition performance was more affected by a consonant alteration (e.g., leche →keche). These findings replicate previous findings in Italian and French and generalize them to a third Romance language (Spanish). As such, they support the idea that specific factors common to Romance languages might be driving an early consonant bias in lexical processing.