English-learning one- to two-year-olds do not show a consonant bias in word learning

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 41; no. 5; pp. 1085 - 1114
• Main Authors: FLOCCIA, CAROLINE, NAZZI, THIERRY, DELLE LUCHE, CLAIRE, POLTROCK, SILVANA, GOSLIN, JEREMY
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.09.2014
• Subjects: Adults; Auditory Perception; Bias; Biological and medical sciences; British English; Child development; Child Language; Child, Preschool; Children; Consonants; Developmental psychology; English; English as a second language learning; English language; Evidence; Female; Foreign Countries; French; French language; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Infant; Infants; Language; Language Acquisition; Language Development; Language Processing; Learning; Linguistic Input; Listening Comprehension; Male; Native Language; Neuropsychology; Newborn. Infant; Phonemes; Phonetics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Romance Languages; Task Analysis; Toddlers; United Kingdom; Vocabulary Development; Vocabulary learning; Vowels; Word Processing; Word Recognition; Young Children; United Kingdom; United Kingdom > UK; France; Human; Word; Lexicon; Infant; Cognition; Experimental study; Learning; English; Consonant; Acquisition process; Language; Information processing; Language development; Cognitive bias
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000913000287

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this ambiguity by using an interactive word-learning study similar to that used in French, with British-English-learning toddlers aged 1;4 and 1;11. Children were taught two CVC labels differing on either a consonant or vowel and tested on their pairing of a third object named with one of the previously taught labels, or part of them. In concert with previous research on British-English toddlers, our results provided no evidence of a general consonant bias. The language-specific mechanisms explaining the differential status for consonants and vowels in lexical development are discussed.