title: Perception mirrors production in 14- and 18-month-olds: the case of coda consonants.
abstract: In a word learning experiment, 14- and 18-month-old infants are tested on their perceptual sensitivity to coda-consonant omissions. The results indicate that 14-month-olds are not sensitive to coda consonant omissions, showing a parallel with the omission of target coda consonants in early child language productions. At 18 months, infants are sensitive to coda-omission. The study strengthens the hypothesis that phonological wellformedness constraints influence infants' speech processing in general, and might restrict what is stored in their initial lexical representations. A lexical representation lacking information on the target coda consonant is, in turn, a likely source for coda-omissions in production.
authors.affiliation: Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition & Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, The Netherlands. c.c.levelt@hum.leidenuniv.nl
authors.forename: Clara C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Levelt
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014825:Vocabulary