Children’s Speech Errors Reflect Phonotactics That They Say and Hear

Abstract

ABSTRACT Adults learn phonotactics from what they say and hear, and this learning is revealed in speech errors. Previous work on the transfer of phonotactic learning from perception to production found that adults learn the constraints in what they say instead of what they hear, unless they are monitoring what they hear for errors. We investigated whether children exhibit this same phonotactic learning phenomenon. Children alternated reciting tongue twisters containing experimental phonotactic constraints and listening to tongue twisters with the same or opposing phonotactic constraints. Participants performed either an error monitoring task or a phoneme identification task while listening. Children’s resulting speech errors reflected the constraints in what they said and, to some extent, in what they heard regardless of the task performed during the perception trials. This is a marked difference from experiments with adults and suggests that the transfer of phonotactic learning from perception to production may differ across the lifespan. We consider several developmental explanations for this difference including reading ability.