Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T04:35:21.418Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Input frequency and lexical variability in phonological development: a survival analysis of word-initial cluster production*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2012

MITSUHIKO OTA  and
SAM J. GREEN
MITSUHIKO OTA*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
SAM J. GREEN
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Address for correspondence: Mitsuhiko Ota, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK. e-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11–4 ; 0). The analysis took account of several lexical factors in addition to lexical input frequency, including the age of first production, production frequency, neighborhood density and number of phonemes. The results showed that lexical input frequency was a significant predictor of the age at which the accuracy level of cluster production in each word first reached 80%. The magnitude of the frequency effect differed across cluster types. Our findings indicate that some of the between-word variance found in the development of sound production can indeed be attributed to the frequency of words in the child's ambient language.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 539 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

The authors wish to thank the JCL editors and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft, Leonid Spektor for adding the d40 option to KWAL to facilitate our CLAN analysis, Filip Smolík for advice on survival analysis, and the audience at the PhonBank workshop 2010 and ICPC 2011 for helpful discussions. All errors are, of course, our own.

References

REFERENCES

Balota, D. A. & Chumbley, J. I. (1985). The locus of word-frequency effects in the pronunciation task: Lexical access and/or production? Journal of Memory and Language 24, 89–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., Neely, J. H., Nelson, D. L., Simpson, G. B. & Treiman, R. (2007). The English Lexicon Project. Behavior Research Methods 39, 445–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berg, T. (1995). Sound change in child language: A study of inter-word variation. Language and Speech 38, 331–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charles-Luce, J. & Luce, P. A. (1990). Similarity neighbourhoods of words in young children's lexicons. Journal of Child Language 17, 205–215.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coady, J. A. & Aslin, R. N. (2003). Phonological neighbourhoods in the developing lexicon. Journal of Child Language 30, 441–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coetzee, A. & Pater, J. (2008). Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 26, 289–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, D. R. (1972). Regression models and life-tables. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 2, 187–220.Google Scholar
Dell, G. S. (1990). Effects of frequency and vocabulary type on phonological speech errors. Language and Cognitive Processes 5, 313–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J. & Alter, J. (2006). Word-minimality, epenthesis, and coda licensing in the acquisition of English. Language & Speech 49, 137–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dollaghan, C. A. (1994). Children's phonological neighbourhoods: Half empty or half full? Journal of Child Language 21, 257–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferguson, C. A. & Farwell, C. B. (1975). Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Language 51, 419–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forster, K. I. & Chambers, S. M. (1973). Lexical access and naming time. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12, 627–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garlock, V., Walley, A. C. & Metsala, J. L. (2001). Age-of-acquisition, word frequency, and neighborhood density effects on spoken word recognition by children and adults. Journal of Memory and Language 45, 468–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gierut, J. A. (2001). A model of lexical diffusion in phonological acquisition. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 15, 19–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gierut, J. A. & Dale, R. A. (2007). Comparability of lexical corpora: Word frequency in phonological generalization. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 21, 423–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gierut, J. A., Morrisette, M. L. & Champion, A. H. (1999). Lexical constraints in language acquisition, Journal of Child Language 26, 261–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gierut, J. A. & Storkel, H. L. (2002). Markedness and the grammar in lexical diffusion of fricatives. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 16, 115–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodman, J. C., Dale, P. S. & Li, P. (2008). Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 35, 515–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hsieh, H.-I. (1972). Lexical diffusion: Evidence from child language acquisition. Glossa 6, 89–104.Google Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M. & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology 27, 236–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, R. (1941/68). Child language, aphasia and phonological universals. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jescheniak, J. D. & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20, 824–43.Google Scholar
Johnson, J. S., Lewis, L. B. & Hogan, J. C. (1997). A production limitation in syllable number: A longitudinal study of one child's early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 24, 327–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keren-Portnoy, T., Vihman, M. M., DePaolis, R. A., Whitaker, C. J. & Williams, N. M. (2010). The role of vocal practice in constructing phonological working memory. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 53, 1280–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kucera, H. & Francis, W. N. (1967). Computational analysis of present day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.Google Scholar
Landauer, T. K. & Streeter, L. A. (1973). Structural differences between common and rare words: Failure of equivalence assumptions for theories of word recognition. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12, 119–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leonard, L. B. & Ritterman, S. I. (1971). Articulation of /s/ as a function of cluster and word frequency of occurrence. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 14, 476–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lleó, C. & Prinz, M. (1996). Consonant clusters in child phonology and the directionality of syllable structure assignment. Journal of Child Language 23, 31–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Luce, P. A. & Pisoni, D. B. (1998). Recognizing spoken words: The neighborhood activation model. Ear & Hearing 19, 1–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Macken, M. (1992). Where's phonology? In Ferguson, C. A., Menn, L. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (eds), Phonological development: Models, research, implications, 249–69. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Macken, M. & Barton, D. (1980). The acquisition of the voicing contrast in English: A study of voice onset time in word-initial stop consonants. Journal of Child Language 7, 41–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Menn, L. & Matthei, E. (1992). The ‘two-lexicon’ account of child phonology: Looking back, looking ahead. In Ferguson, C. A., Menn, L. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (eds), Phonological development: Models, research, implications, 211–47. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Metsala, J. (1997). An examination of word frequency and neighborhood density in the development of spoken-word recognition. Memory & Cognition 25, 47–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Metsala, J. & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In Metsala, J. L. & Ehri, L. C. (eds), Word recognition in beginning literacy, 89–120. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Moore, W. H., Burke, J. & Adams, C. (1976). The effects of stimulability of the articulation of /s/ relative to cluster and word frequency of occurrence. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 19, 458–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morrisette, M. L. & Gierut, J. A. (2002). Lexical organization and phonological change in treatment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45, 143–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38, 1–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ota, M. (2006). Input frequency and word truncation in child Japanese: Structural and lexical effects. Language and Speech 49, 261–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pater, J. (2005). Learning a stratified grammar. In Burgos, A., Clark-Cotton, M. R. & Ha, S. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 482–92. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Phillips, B. (2006). Word frequency and lexical diffusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowland, C. R., Fletcher, S. L. & Freudenthal, D. (2008). How big is big enough? Assessing the reliability of data from naturalistic samples. In Behrens, H. (ed.), Trends in corpus research: Finding structure in data, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schwartz, R. G. & Terrell, B. Y. (1983). The role of input frequency in lexical acquisition. Journal of Child Language Acquisition 10, 57–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singer, J. D. & Willet, J. B. (1991). Modeling the days of our lives: Using survival analysis when designing and analyzing longitudinal studies of duration and the timing of events. Psychological Bulletin 110, 268–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smit, A. (1993). Phonological error distribution in the Iowa−Nebraska articulation norms project: Word-initial consonant clusters. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 931–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, N. (1973). The acquisition of phonology: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smolík, P. (2005). Lexical growth and acquisition of morphological forms. In Burgos, A., Clark-Cotton, M. R. & Ha, S. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 564–73. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Sosa, A. V. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (2006). Patterns of intra-word phonological variability during the second year of life. Journal of Child Language 33, 31–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosa, A. V. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (in press). Lexical and phonological effects in early word production. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.Google Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1984). Structural errors in normal and agrammatic speech. Cognitive Neuropsychology 1, 281–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoel-Gammon, C. (2011). Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children. Journal of Child Language 38, 1–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Storkel, H. (2004). Do children acquire dense neighborhoods? An investigation of similarity neighborhoods in lexical acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics 25, 201–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swingley, D. (2007). Lexical exposure and word-form encoding in 1·5-year-olds. Developmental Psychology 43, 454–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. & Bornstein, M. H. (1990). Language, play, and attention at one year. Infant Behavior and Development 13, 85–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Bornstein, M. H., Kahana-Kalman, R., Baumwell, L. & Cyphers, L. (1998). Predicting variation in the timing of language milestones in the second year: An events history approach. Journal of Child Language 25, 675–700.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M. & Stahl, D. (2004). Sampling children's spontaneous speech: How much is enough? Journal of Child Language 31, 101–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, A. A. & Edwards, M. L. (1993). Lexical acquisition and acquisition of initial voiceless stops. Journal of Child Language 20, 253–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vihman, M. (1982). A note on children's lexical representations. Journal of Child Language 9, 249–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vihman, M. & DePaolis, R. A. (2000). The role of mimesis in infant language development: Evidence for phylogeny. In Knight, C., Hurford, J. & Studdert Kennedy, M. (eds), The evolutionary emergence of language, 130–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zipf, G. K. (1935). The psycho-biology of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar