Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations.
The experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language properties, token and type frequency, as they contribute to phonotactic learning. Token frequency is the raw number of exposures children have to a particular pattern; type frequency refers to a count of abstract entities, such as unique words. Our results suggest that children's production accuracy is most sensitive to a combination of type and token frequency: children were able to generalize a target phonotactic sequence to a new word when familiarized with multiple word-types across tokens from multiple talkers, but not when presented with either word-types with no talker variability or multiple talker-tokens of a single word.
University of Arizona, AZ, USA. prichtsmeier@yahoo.com
Peter
P
Richtsmeier
Louann
L
Gerken
Diane
D
Ohala
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D014706:Verbal Learning