A Protracted Developmental Trajectory for English-Learning Children's Detection of Consonant Mispronunciations in Newly Learned Words.

ABSTRACT: Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, two-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed evidence of learning the taught word. Adults' target looking was reduced when the novel word was realized at test with a change in

SUBMITTER: Quam C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10292720 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature