ERIC Number: EJ1292107
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Apr
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0012-1649
EISSN: N/A
Variable Forms in French-Learning Toddlers' Lexical Representations
Babineau, Mireille; Legrand, Camille; Shi, Rushen
Developmental Psychology, v57 n4 p457-470 Apr 2021
We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on children's early lexical representations of this frequent intrusion by consonants by testing whether toddlers store multiple forms for vowel-initial words (e.g., téléphant, zéléphant) early in acquisition. Thirty-one Quebec French-learning 30-month-olds completed an eye-tracking experiment (16 girls). Children were predominantly from White, middle-class families living in a large urban area (Montreal). Each trial presented two objects while one of them was named. There were four key trial types: (1) correct vowel-initial (e.g., joli éléphant [pretty elephant]); (2) pragmatically incorrect frequent intrusion (e.g., joli zéléphant, /z/ intrusion [pretty elephants], which is grammatically acceptable but does not correspond to the picture); (3) lexically incorrect frequent intrusion (e.g., joli téléphant, /t/ intrusion, as /t/ is a frequent liaison consonant in general but is impossible with joli); and (4) lexically incorrect infrequent intrusion (e.g., joli géléphant, /g/ intrusion, as /g/ is an infrequent liaison consonant and is also impossible with joli). The results showed that target recognition was successful in the frequent /t/- and /z/-intrusion trials and was also evident in the vowel-initial trials, whereas it was impeded in the infrequent /g/-intrusion trials. Our findings demonstrate that French-learning children's early lexicon contains multiple variants for words that are subject to phonological alternations, including frequent liaison-consonant variants.
Descriptors: French, Toddlers, Phonology, Vowels, Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Eye Movements, Language Processing, Urban Areas, Naming, Grammar, Pictorial Stimuli, Task Analysis, Error Patterns, Phonemes, Foreign Countries, Word Recognition, Nouns, Ambiguity (Context)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada (Montreal)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A