Abstract

Although infants perceptually attune to native vowels and consonants well before 12 months, at 13–15 months, they have difficulty learning to associate novel words that differ by their initial consonant (e.g., BIN and DIN) to their visual referents. However, this difficulty may not apply to all minimal pair novel words. While Canadian English (CE) 15-month-olds failed to respond to a switch from the newly learned word DEET to the novel non-word DOOT, they did notice a switch from DEET to DIT (Curtin et al., 2009). Those authors argued that early word learners capitalize on large phonetic differences, seen in CE DEET–DIT, but not on smaller phonetic differences, as in CE DEET–DOOT. To assess this hypothesis, we tested Australian English (AusE) 15-month-olds, as AusE has a smaller magnitude of phonetic difference in both novel word pairs. Two groups of infants were trained on the novel word DEET and tested on the vowel switches in DIT and DOOT, produced by an AusE female speaker or the same CE female speaker as in Curtin et al. (2009). If the size of the phonetic distinction plays a more central role than native accent experience in early word learning, AusE children should more easily recognize both of the unfamiliar but larger CE vowel switches than the more familiar but smaller AusE ones. The results support our phonetic-magnitude hypothesis: AusE children taught and tested with the CE-accented novel words looked longer to both of the switch test trials (DIT, DOOT) than same test trials (DEET), while those who heard the AusE-accented tokens did not notice either switch. Implications of our findings for models of early word learning are discussed.

Highlights

  • The first year of life sees the emergence of native phonemic categories, demonstrated by children’s persisting discrimination of native contrasts and diminishing discrimination of non-native contrasts (Werker and Tees, 1983, 1984; Polka and Werker, 1994)

  • We examined Australian English (AusE) 15-month-olds’ ability to learn and discriminate the novel words discriminate the vowel in familiarization trials (DEET), DIT and DOOT, comparing performance between participants presented with the words produced in their native AusE accent, and participants presented with words produced in the unfamiliar Canadian English (CE) accent

  • With respect to overall attention to the task, a mixed 2 × 2 analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant effect of trial [F(1,46) = 371.11, p < 0.001; η2p = 0.89], with infants looking longer to the post-test trial (M = 18.31 s, SD = 1.71) than to the average of the last two familiarization trials (M = 7.89 s, SD = 3.18), and there was no interaction with accent

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Summary

Introduction

The first year of life sees the emergence of native phonemic categories, demonstrated by children’s persisting discrimination of native contrasts and diminishing discrimination of non-native contrasts (Werker and Tees, 1983, 1984; Polka and Werker, 1994). Infants aged 6–8 months brought up in an English language environment discriminate the Hindi contrast [”t a]-[úa] and Salish contrast [k’i]-[q’i], but by 10– 12 months this ability declines, and continues to do so until, like English-speaking adults, they are no longer able to reliably discriminate many contrasts that are not present in their native language environment. Children brought up in Hindi or Salish language environments continue to discriminate the contrasts present in their native languages, as do Hindi-speaking and Salish-speaking adults (Werker and Tees, 1983, 1984)

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