TY - JOUR
T1 - Finding patterns and learning words
T2 - Infant phonotactic knowledge is associated with vocabulary size
AU - Graf Estes, Katharine
AU - Gluck, Stephanie Chen Wu
AU - Grimm, Kevin
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a grant to K.G.E. from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD062755). We thank Carolina Bastos, Abbie Thompson, and members of the Language Learning Lab at the University of California, Davis, for their assistance with this research. We also thank Jill Lany and Jan Edwards for their input on the manuscript and for helpful discussions regarding this work. In addition, we thank the parents who generously contributed their time.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2016/6/1
Y1 - 2016/6/1
N2 - Native language statistical regularities about allowable phoneme combinations (i.e., phonotactic patterns) may provide learners with cues to support word learning. The current research investigated the association between infants' native language phonotactic knowledge and their word learning progress, as measured by vocabulary size. In the experiment, 19-month-old infants listened to a corpus of nonce words that contained novel phonotactic patterns. All words began with "illegal" consonant clusters that cannot occur in native (English) words. The rationale for the task was that infants with fragile phonotactic knowledge should exhibit stronger learning of the novel illegal phonotactic patterns than infants with robust phonotactic knowledge. We found that infants with smaller vocabularies showed stronger phonotactic learning than infants with larger vocabularies even after accounting for general cognition. We propose that learning about native language structure may promote vocabulary development by providing a foundation for word learning; infants with smaller vocabularies may have weaker support from phonotactics than infants with larger vocabularies. Furthermore, stored vocabulary knowledge may promote the detection of phonotactic patterns even during infancy.
AB - Native language statistical regularities about allowable phoneme combinations (i.e., phonotactic patterns) may provide learners with cues to support word learning. The current research investigated the association between infants' native language phonotactic knowledge and their word learning progress, as measured by vocabulary size. In the experiment, 19-month-old infants listened to a corpus of nonce words that contained novel phonotactic patterns. All words began with "illegal" consonant clusters that cannot occur in native (English) words. The rationale for the task was that infants with fragile phonotactic knowledge should exhibit stronger learning of the novel illegal phonotactic patterns than infants with robust phonotactic knowledge. We found that infants with smaller vocabularies showed stronger phonotactic learning than infants with larger vocabularies even after accounting for general cognition. We propose that learning about native language structure may promote vocabulary development by providing a foundation for word learning; infants with smaller vocabularies may have weaker support from phonotactics than infants with larger vocabularies. Furthermore, stored vocabulary knowledge may promote the detection of phonotactic patterns even during infancy.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Language specialization
KW - Phonotactics
KW - Speech perception
KW - Statistical learning
KW - Vocabulary development
KW - Word learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.012
DO - 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.012
M3 - Article
C2 - 26905502
AN - SCOPUS:84959432633
SN - 0022-0965
VL - 146
SP - 34
EP - 49
JO - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
JF - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
ER -