The influence of exposure to phonological neighbours on preschoolers' novel word production.
We investigated the influence of exposure to phonologically similar words on four-year-olds' acquisition of novel object words. In Experiment 1, hearing phonological neighbours before learning a new word did not influence children's novel word productions. In Experiment 2, when children heard the phonological neighbours of a novel word after learning a new word, they correctly produced the target word more often than children who did not receive this exposure. These findings suggest that exposing children to similar sounding words after a novel word was introduced may have helped maintain a representation of that word in working memory, leading to enhanced word learning.
University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada.
Tamara L
TL
Demke
Susan A
SA
Graham
Paul D
PD
Siakaluk
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011897:Random Allocation; D012931:Social Environment; D013060:Speech; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary