ERIC Number: EJ1279506
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Jan
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0012-1649
EISSN: N/A
The Development of Infants' Responses to Mispronunciations: A Meta-Analysis
Developmental Psychology, v57 n1 p1-18 Jan 2021
As they develop into mature speakers of their native language, infants must not only learn words but also the sounds that make up those words. To do so, they must strike a balance between accepting speaker-dependent variation (e.g., mood, voice, accent) but appropriately rejecting variation when it (potentially) changes a word's meaning (e.g., cat vs. hat). This meta-analysis focuses on studies investigating infants' ability to detect mispronunciations in familiar words, or mispronunciation sensitivity. Our goal was to evaluate the development of infants' phonological representations for familiar words as well as explore the role of experimental manipulations related to theoretical questions and of analysis choices. The results show that although infants are sensitive to mispronunciations, they still accept these altered forms as labels for target objects. Interestingly, this ability is not modulated by age or vocabulary size, suggesting that a mature understanding of native language phonology may be present in infants from an early age, possibly before the vocabulary explosion. These results support several theoretical assumptions made in the literature, such as sensitivity to mispronunciation size and position of the mispronunciation. We also shed light on the impact of data analysis choices that may lead to different conclusions regarding the development of infants' mispronunciation sensitivity. Our article concludes with recommendations for improved practice in testing infants' word and sentence processing online.
Descriptors: Infants, Pronunciation, Auditory Discrimination, Phonological Awareness, Child Development, Age Differences, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Word Recognition, Effect Size, Familiarity
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research; Information Analyses
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: DC00046