Although toddlers in their 2nd year of life generally have phonologically detailed representations of words, a consistent lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of phonological changes has been reported. The origin of these insensitivities is poorly understood, and uncovering their cause is crucial for obtaining a complete picture of early…

The present article investigates the acquisition of Manner of Articulation (MoA) contrasts in child language production. We analyzed spontaneous longitudinal speech data of four German and six Dutch 1- to 3-year-olds. The data suggest that the acquisition of MoA contrasts is influenced by various co-occurrence constraints at the word level.…

Toddlers' discrimination of native phonemic contrasts is generally unproblematic. Yet using those native contrasts in word learning and word recognition can be more challenging. In this article, we investigate perceptual versus phonological explanations for asymmetrical patterns found in early word recognition. We systematically investigated the…