Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-xtvcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-28T06:04:22.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The role of geminates in infants' early word production and word-form recognition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2016

MARILYN VIHMAN  and
MARINELLA MAJORANO Open the ORCID record for MARINELLA MAJORANO [Opens in a new window]
MARILYN VIHMAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York
MARINELLA MAJORANO
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Verona
*
Address for correspondence: Marilyn Vihman, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. tel: +44 1904433612; e-mail: marilyn.vihman@york.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have been found to ‘overselect’ and ‘overproduce’ these consonants in early words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant. A production study with thirty Italian children recorded at 1;3 and 1;9 strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. To test the hypothesis that it is the salience of the medial geminate that detracts attention from the initial consonant we conducted three experiments with 11-month-old Italian infants. We first established baseline word-form recognition for untrained familiar trochaic disyllables and then tested for word-form recognition, separately for words with geminates and singletons, after changing the initial consonant to create nonwords from both familiar and rare forms. Familiar words with geminates were recognized despite the change, words with singletons were not. The findings indicate that a feature occurring later in the word affects initial consonant production and perception, which supports the whole-word phonology model.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 158 - 184
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

The authors would like to thank Tamar Keren-Portnoy for her help planning the analysis of the production data and both Rory A. DePaolis and Tamar Keren-Portnoy for their advice regarding the choice of stimuli and other aspects of the experimental design. We thank Andrea Capra, who kindly recorded the stimuli and helped to set up the experiments, Chiara Rainieri, who also helped with the experiments and carried out some analyses of the production data, and Laura Guidotti, who carefully checked the production data for all thirty children at two time-points. Last but not least we thank all of the families for their participation.

References

REFERENCES

Bhaya Nair, R. (1991). Monosyllabic English or disyllabic Hindi? Indian Linguistics 52, 51–90.Google Scholar
Boysson-Bardies, B. de & Vihman, M. M. (1991). Adaptation to language: evidence from babbling and first words in four languages. Language 67, 297–319.Google Scholar
Buder, E. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (2002). American and Swedish children's acquisition of vowel duration: effects of vowel identity and final stop voicing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 111, 1854–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caselli, M. C. & Casadio, P. (1995). Il primo vocabolario del bambino: Guida all'uso del questionario MacArthur per la valutazione della comunicazione e del linguaggio nei primi anni di vita. Milano: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Davis, B. L. & MacNeilage, P. F. (2000). An embodiment perspective on the acquisition of speech perception. Phonetica 57, 229–41.Google Scholar
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J. & Alter, J. (2006). Word minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English. Language and Speech 49, 137–74.Google Scholar
Grunwell, P. (1982). Clinical phonology. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Hallé, P. & Boysson-Bardies, B. de (1994). Emergence of an early lexicon: infants’ recognition of words. Infant Behavior and Development 17, 119–29.Google Scholar
Hallé, P. & Boysson-Bardies, B. de (1996). The format of representation of recognized words in infants’ early receptive lexicon. Infant Behavior and Development 19, 435–51.Google Scholar
James, L. E. & Fogler, K. A. (2007). Meeting Mr. Davis vs. meeting Mr. Davin: the effects of name frequency on learning proper names in young and older adults. Memory 15, 366–74.Google Scholar
Kager, R., Pater, J. & Zonneveld, W. (eds.) (2004). Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kemler Nelson, D. G., Jusczyk, P. W., Mandel, D. R., Myers, J., Turk, A. & Gerken, L. A. (1995). The head-turn preference procedure for testing auditory perception. Infant Behavior and Development 18, 111–6.Google Scholar
Keren-Portnoy, T., Majorano, M. & Vihman, M. M. (2009). From phonetics to phonology: the emergence of first words in Italian. Journal of Child Language 36, 235–67.Google Scholar
Keren-Portnoy, T. & Segal, O. (in press). Phonological development in Hebrew- learning infants and toddlers: perception and production. To appear in Berman, R. (ed.), Acquisition of Hebrew from infancy to adolescence. TiLAR. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Khattab, G. & Al-Tamimi, J. (2013). Early phonological patterns in Lebanese Arabic. In Vihman, M. M. & Keren-Portnoy, T. (eds), The emergence of phonology, 374–414. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kunnari, S. (2000). Characteristics of early lexical and phonological development in children acquiring Finnish. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis B34, University of Oulu.Google Scholar
Kunnari, S., Nakai, S. & Vihman, M. M. (2001). Cross-linguistic evidence for the acquisition of geminates. Psychology of Language and Communication 5, 13–24.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk, Vol. 1: Transcription format and programs, and Vol. 2: The database. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Majorano, M., Rainieri, C. & Corsano, P. (2013). Parents' child-directed communication and child language development: a longitudinal study with Italian toddlers. Journal of Child Language 40, 836–59.Google Scholar
Marconi, L., Ott, M., Pesenti, E., Ratti, D. & Tavella, M. (1994). Lessico elementare: Dati statistici sull'italiano scritto e letto dai bambini delle elementari. Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar
Olswang, L. B., Stoel-Gammon, C., Coggins, T. & Carpenter, R. (1987). Assessing prelinguistic and early linguistic behaviors in developmentally young children. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Ota, M. (2003). The development of prosodic structure in early words. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Payne, E., Post, B., Astruc, L., Prieto, P. & Vanrell, M. M. (2012). Measuring child rhythm. Language and Speech 55, 203–29.Google Scholar
Rinaldi, P., Barca, L. & Burani, C. (2004). A database for semantic, grammatical and frequency properties of the first words acquired by Italian children. Behavior, Research Methods, Instruments & Computers 36, 525–30.Google Scholar
Savinainen-Makkonen, T. (2000a). Learning long words – a typological perspective. Language and Speech 43, 205–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Savinainen-Makkonen, T. (2000b). Word initial consonant omissions – a developmental process in children learning Finnish. First Language 20, 161–85.Google Scholar
Savinainen-Makkonen, T. (2001). Suomalainen lapsi fonologiaa omaksumassa. [Finnish children acquiring phonology.] Publications of the Department of Phonetics, University of Helsinki 42.Google Scholar
Savinainen-Makkonen, T. (2007). Geminate template: a model for first Finnish words. First Language 27, 347–59. Reprinted in Vihman & Keren-Portnoy (2013b).Google Scholar
Seal, B., DePaolis, R. A., Baird, C., Kulsar, S., Keren-Portnoy, T. & Vihman, M. M. (2012). The effect of dialect, speaker gender, otitis media, and modality on word form recognition. Paper presented at the International Child Phonology Conference, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Smith, B. (1978). Temporal aspects of English speech production: a developmental perspective. Journal of Phonetics 6, 37–67.Google Scholar
Stoel-Gammon, C., Williams, K. & Buder, E. (1994). Cross-language differences in phonological acquisition: Swedish and American /t/. Institute of Linguistics University of Stockholm (PERILUS) 18, 21–38.Google Scholar
Swingley, D. (2005). Eleven-month-olds’ knowledge of how familiar words sound. Developmental Science 8, 432–43.Google Scholar
Szreder, M. (2013). The acquisition of consonant clusters in Polish: a case study. In Vihman, M. M. & Keren-Portnoy, T. (eds), The emergence of phonology, 343–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (2010). Phonological templates in early words: a cross-linguistic study. In Fougeron, C., Kühnert, B., D'Imperio, M. & Vallée, N. (eds), Laboratory phonology 10, 261–84. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (2014). Phonological development: the first two years, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (2015). Perception and production in phonological development. In MacWhinney, B. & O'Grady, W. (eds), Handbook of language emergence, 437–57. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (2016). Prosodic structures and templates in bilingual phonological development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19, 69–88.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. & Croft, W. (2007). Phonological development: toward a ‘radical’ templatic phonology. Linguistics 45, 683–725.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Kay, E., Boysson-Bardies, B. de, Durand, C. & Sundberg, U. (1994). External sources of individual differences? A cross-linguistic analysis of the phonetics of mothers’ speech to one-year-old children. Developmental Psychology 30, 652–63.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. & Keren-Portnoy, T. (2013a). Introduction. In Vihman, M. M. & Keren-Portnoy, T. (eds), The emergence of phonology, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. & Keren-Portnoy, T. (eds.) (2013b). The emergence of phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. & Kunnari, S. (2006). The sources of phonological knowledge: a cross-linguistic perspective. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 35, 133–64.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Macken, M. A., Miller, R., Simmons, H. & Miller, J. (1985). From babbling to speech: a reassessment of the continuity issue. Language 61, 395–443.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. & McCune, L. (1994). When is a word a word? Journal of Child Language 21, 517–42.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Nakai, S. & DePaolis, R. A. (2006). Getting the rhythm right: a cross-linguistic study of segmental duration in babbling and first words. In Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. & Best, C. (eds), Laboratory phonology 8, 341–66. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Nakai, S., DePaolis, R. A. & Hallé, P. (2004). The role of accentual pattern in early lexical representation. Journal of Memory and Language 50, 336–53.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Thierry, G., Lum, J., Keren-Portnoy, T. & Martin, P. (2007). Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh and English–Welsh bilingual infants. Applied Psycholinguistics 28, 475–93.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. & Velleman, S. L. (2000). The construction of a first phonology. Phonetica 57, 255–66.Google Scholar
Wauquier, S. & Yamaguchi, N. (2013). Templates in French. In Vihman, M. M. & Keren-Portnoy, T. (eds), The emergence of phonology, 317–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Vihman and Majorano supplementary material

Appendix

Download Vihman and Majorano supplementary material(File)
File 25.4 KB