Children's phonological neighbourhoods: half empty or half full?
Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) found smaller phonological similarity neighbourhoods in five- and seven-year-old children's expressive lexicons than in an adult receptive lexicon, a finding they interpreted as evidence that children need not employ fine-grained auditory perceptual analyses in lexical processing. In the present investigation, neighbourhood sizes were calculated for an expressive lexicon derived from two vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;0 to 3;0 (Rescorla, 1989; Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989). Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbour; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbours. Very young children must have access to reasonably detailed phonological information in order to create and distinguish among such phonologically similar lexical entries.
Dollaghan
C A
CA
University of Pittsburgh.
D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary