title: Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters.
abstract: Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label because its neighbor dog is also an object. In three experiments, French 18-month-olds were taught novel words whose word forms were phonologically similar to familiar nouns (noun-neighbors), to familiar verbs (verb-neighbors) or to nothing (no-neighbors). Toddlers successfully learned the no-neighbors and verb-neighbors but failed to learn the noun-neighbors, although both novel neighbors had a familiar phonological neighbor in the toddlers' lexicon. We conclude that when creating a novel lexical entry, toddlers' evaluation of similarity in the lexicon is multidimensional, incorporating both phonological and semantic or syntactic features.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Études Cognitives (École Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University), Paris, France; Maternité Port-Royal, AP-HP, Faculté de Médecine Paris Descartes, France. Electronic address: isabelle.dautriche@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Dautriche
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, United States.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Swingley
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Études Cognitives (École Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University), Paris, France; Maternité Port-Royal, AP-HP, Faculté de Médecine Paris Descartes, France.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Christophe
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Language acquisition; Lexical access; Phonetic sensitivity; Word learning