A perceptually-based model of children's earliest productions

Abstract

A model is proposed to account for processes underlying the initial extraction and representation of words. The model incorporates perceptual salience into a framework provided by autosegmental phonology. In one study, predictions of the model were tested in a corpus of utterances obtaind from three children in the one-word speech period. Analyses of the corpus supported the predictions, suggesting that salience of elements such as stressed and final syllables may contribute to the form of early productions and, specifically, to the form of utterances containing filler syllables and full or partial reduplications. Because the data for this study were children's productions, and the model concerns children's representations, a second study was carried out to investigate representations somewhat more directly. That study also explored the possible influence of an additional prosodic factor on the form of early words. A word-learning task with 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds and adults assessed whether children would attend to stress pattern or segmental sequence in identifying the referent for a word. As expected, children did rely on prosody in their word choices far more frequently than did adults, suggesting that one prosodic component, stress pattern, may in some cases be prominent in a child's representation for a word. The results of the two studies provide support for the utility of the autosegmental framework, as well as additional evidence for the perceptual salience of stressed and final syllables and of stress pattern.