Journal article
Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning
Developmental science, Vol.12(2), pp.339-349
03/2009
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x
PMCID: PMC3011987
PMID: 19143806
Abstract
Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e., word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite the ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has examined if bottom-up acoustic-phonetic factors play a role. We hypothesized that lexical neighbor learning could be improved by incorporating greater acoustic variability in the words being learned, as this may buttress still developing phonetic categories, and help infants identify the relevant contrastive dimension. Infants were exposed to pictures accompanied by labels spoken by either a single or multiple speakers. At test, infants in the single-speaker condition failed to recognize the difference between the two words, while infants who heard multiple speakers discriminated between them.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning
- Creators
- Gwyneth C Rost - Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology, University of IowaBob McMurray - Dept. of Psychology, University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Developmental science, Vol.12(2), pp.339-349
- DOI
- 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x
- PMID
- 19143806
- PMCID
- PMC3011987
- NLM abbreviation
- Dev Sci
- ISSN
- 1363-755X
- eISSN
- 1467-7687
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/2009
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders; Linguistics; Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute; Otolaryngology
- Record Identifier
- 9984070724302771
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