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Phonological neighbourhoods in the developing lexicon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2003

JEFFRY A. COADY  and
RICHARD N. ASLIN
JEFFRY A. COADY
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
RICHARD N. ASLIN
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Abstract

Structural analyses of developing lexicons have provided evidence for both children's holistic lexical representations and sensitivity to phonetic segments. In the present investigation, neighbourhood analyses of two children's (age 3;6) expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighbourhood size was calculated as the proportion of the lexicon to which each target word is similar, to normalize for vocabulary size differences. These analyses revealed that children's lexicons contain more similar sounding words than previous analyses indicated. Further, neighbourhoods appear denser earlier in development relative to vocabulary size, presumably because children first learn words with more frequent sounds and sound combinations. Neighbourhood density as a proportion of the size of the lexicon then decreases over development as children acquire words with less frequent sounds and sound combinations. These findings suggest that positing fundamentally different lexical representations for children may be premature.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , May 2003 , pp. 441 - 469
Copyright
2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was conducted as part of the first author's dissertation at the University of Rochester. It was supported by a grant from the NIH (HD-37082) to the second author. We are grateful to Daniel Swingley, James Magnuson and Jason Zevin for assistance conducting the corpus analyses, and to Keith Kluender and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.