A phonetic approach to consonant repetition in early words

The goal of this study was to evaluate movement-based principles for understanding early speech output patterns. Consonant repetition patterns within children's actual productions of word forms were analyzed using spontaneous speech data from 10 typically developing American-English learning children between 12 and 36 months of age. Place of articulation, word level patterns, and developmental trends in CVC and CVCV repeated word forms were evaluated. Labial and coronal place repetitions dominated. Regressive repetition (e.g., [gag] for “dog”) occurred frequently in CVC but not in CVCV word forms. Consonant repetition decreased over time. However, the children produced sound types available reported as being within young children's production system capabilities in consonant repetitions in all time periods. Findings suggest that a movement-based approach can provide a framework for comprehensively characterizing consonant place repetition patterns in early speech development.     

Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate two competing hypotheses about the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in word generation. One proposes a domain-specific organization, with neural activation dependent on the type of information being processed, i.e., surface sound structure or semantic. The other proposes a process-specific organization, with activation dependent on processing demands, such as the amount of selection needed to decide between competing lexical alternatives. In a novel word retrieval task, word reconstruction (WR), subjects generated real words from heard non-words by the substitution of either a vowel or consonant. Both types of lexical retrieval, informed by sound structure alone, produced activation within anterior and posterior left IFG regions. Within these regions there was greater activity for consonant WR, which is more difficult and imposes greater processing demands. These results support a process-specific organization of the anterior left IFG.     

Testing the limits of long-distance learning: learning beyond a three-segment window

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models. Long-distance phonotactic patterns have been observed by linguists in many languages, who have proposed different kinds of models, including feature-based bigram and trigram models, as well as precedence models. Contrary to flat-structured bigram and trigram models, these alternatives capture unbounded dependencies because at an abstract level of representation, the relevant elements are locally dependent, even if they are not adjacent at the observable level. Using an artificial grammar learning paradigm, we provide additional support for these alternative models of phonotactics. Participants in two experiments were exposed to a long-distance consonant-harmony pattern in which the first consonant of a five-syllable word was [s] or [∫] ("sh") and triggered a suffix that was either [-su] or [-∫u] depending on the sibilant quality of this first consonant. Participants learned this pattern, despite the large distance between the trigger and the target, suggesting that when participants learn long-distance phonological patterns, that pattern is learned without specific reference to distance.     

What can megastudies tell us about the orthographic structure of English words?

Although the majority of research in visual word recognition has targeted single-syllable words, most words are polysyllabic. These words engender special challenges, one of which concerns their analysis into smaller units. According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants (C) and vowels (V) constrains the orthographic structure of printed words. So far, evidence has been reported only in French with factorial studies of relatively small sets of items. In the present study, we performed regression analyses on corpora of megastudies (English and British Lexicon Project databases) to examine the influence of the CV pattern in English. We compared hiatus words, which present a mismatch between the number of syllables and the number of groups of adjacent vowel letters (e.g., client), to other words, controlling for standard lexical variables. In speeded pronunciation, hiatus words were processed more slowly than control words, and the effect was stronger in low-frequency words. In the lexical decision task, the interference effect of hiatus in low-frequency words was balanced by a facilitatory effect in high-frequency words. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that the configuration of consonant and vowel letters influences the processing of polysyllabic words in English.     

Word learning and phonetic processing in preschool-age children

Consonants and vowels have been shown to play different relative roles in different processes, including retrieving known words from pseudowords during adulthood or simultaneously learning two phonetically similar pseudowords during infancy or toddlerhood. The current study explores the extent to which French-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds exhibit a so-called “consonant bias” in a task simulating word acquisition, that is, when learning new words for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, the to-be-learned words differed both by a consonant and a vowel (e.g., /byf/-/duf/), and children needed to choose which of the two objects to associate with a third one whose name differed from both objects by either a consonant or a vowel (e.g., /dyf/). In such a conflict condition, children needed to favor (or neglect) either consonant information or vowel information. The results show that only 3-year-olds preferentially chose the consonant identity, thereby neglecting the vowel change. The older children (and adults) did not exhibit any response bias. In Experiment 2, children needed to pick up one of two objects whose names differed on either consonant information or vowel information. Whereas 3-year-olds performed better with pairs of pseudowords contrasting on consonants, the pattern of asymmetry was reversed in 4-year-olds, and 5-year-olds did not exhibit any significant response bias. Interestingly, girls showed overall better performance and exhibited earlier changes in performance than boys. The changes in consonant/vowel asymmetry in preschoolers are discussed in relation with developments in linguistic (lexical and morphosyntactic) and cognitive processing.