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Delayed acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2015

NAYELI GONZALEZ-GOMEZ  and
THIERRY NAZZI
NAYELI GONZALEZ-GOMEZ*
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University, Department of Psychology, Oxford, England, and Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France
THIERRY NAZZI
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France, and CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8158), Paris, France
*
Address for correspondence: Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez, Oxford Brookes University, Psychology Department, Gipsy Lane, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK. tel: +44 1 865 48 36 76; e-mail: ngonzalez-gomez@brookes.ac.uk
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Abstract

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior–anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels. Experiments 1 and 2 show that a preference for PA over AP (anterior–posterior) words emerges between 10 and 13 months in French-learning infants. Control experiments show that this bias cannot be explained by adjacent or positional preferences. The present study demonstrates that infants become sensitive to non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities between 10 and 13 months, showing the existence of a delay for the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic regularities compared to equivalent non-adjacent consonantal regularities. These results are consistent with the CV hypothesis, according to which consonants and vowels play different roles at different linguistic levels.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 186 - 206
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

[*]

This study was conducted with the support of a CONACYT grant to NGG, and ANR-13-BSH2-0004 and LABEX EFL (ANR-10-LABX-0083) grants to TN. Special thanks to the infants and their parents for their kindness and cooperation.

References

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