Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in…

Previous research using the name-based categorization task has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn 2 words that only differ by 1 consonantal feature but fail to do so when the words only differ by 1 vocalic feature. This asymmetry was taken as evidence for the proposal that consonants are more important than vowels at the…

Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical…

Describes vocalizations of five 13-month-old infants. Data are reported on syllable shape, vowel-like and consonant-like production in context and time, periodic utterances, complex babbling sequences, recurrent phonetic forms, fundamental frequency, and intonation types. Results are consistent with data from other studies and support theory of…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary-school students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Independent variables were grade level, sex, reading level, community…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Conclusions of the study, reported in Part 2, were (1) pronunciations more…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Discussion of the problem and procedures of the study are found in Part 1,…

When children produce regularizations like "comed," not all verbs are equally liked to be regularized. It is argued that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form, and that regularizations are likely when the base vowel is dominant and unlikely when the past tense vowel is dominant. (Contains 25…

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

Reports a study determining whether significant differences in formant frequency are apparent when chronological age is compared with a measure of physiological age for children during the first six years. (TO)

The primary purposes of this study were to investigate the phonetic bases of nonstandard spellings invented by preschool and primary-grade children, to devise appropriate experimental techniques for eliciting judgments of phonetic relationships from young children, to identify the specific characteristics that influence children's categorization…

Since pronunciations of vowel clusters are among the most unpredictable letter-sound correspondences in English and therefore children learning to read must often rely on something other than spelling as a clue to pronunciation of vowel cluster words, data relating to pronunciation frequencies of certain vowel clusters were gathered for this…

This research report examines the pronunciation that children give to synthetic words containing vowel-cluster spellings and analyzes the observed pronunciations in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. The pronunciations associated with vowel-cluster spellings are among the most unpredictable letter-sound…