Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 143; pp. 77 - 86
• Main Authors: Dautriche, Isabelle, Swingley, Daniel, Christophe, Anne
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.10.2015
• Subjects: Female; Humans; Infant; Language; Language acquisition; Language Development; Lexical access; Male; Phonetic sensitivity; Verbal Learning - physiology; Vocabulary; Word learning; Phonetic sensitivity; Word learning; Language acquisition; Lexical access
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.06.003

•French 18-month-olds succeed in learning novel nouns that sound like a verb they knew.•But they failed to learn novel words that sound like a noun they knew.•To learn new words, toddlers are not overwhelmed by phonological proximity alone.•18-month-olds interpret new words in context, using multiple sources of information. Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label because its neighbor dog is also an object. In three experiments, French 18-month-olds were taught novel words whose word forms were phonologically similar to familiar nouns (noun-neighbors), to familiar verbs (verb-neighbors) or to nothing (no-neighbors). Toddlers successfully learned the no-neighbors and verb-neighbors but failed to learn the noun-neighbors, although both novel neighbors had a familiar phonological neighbor in the toddlers’ lexicon. We conclude that when creating a novel lexical entry, toddlers’ evaluation of similarity in the lexicon is multidimensional, incorporating both phonological and semantic or syntactic features.