Journal Article


Delayed acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic dependencies

Abstract

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels. Experiments 1 and 2 show that a preference for PA over AP (anterior-posterior) words emerges between 10 and 13 months in French-learning infants. Control experiments show that this bias cannot be explained by adjacent or positional preferences. The present study demonstrates that infants become sensitive to non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities between 10 and 13 months, showing the existence of a delay for the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic regularities compared to equivalent non-adjacent consonantal regularities. These results are consistent with the CV hypothesis, according to which consonants and vowels play different roles at different linguistic levels.

Attached files

Authors

Gonzalez-Gomez, N
Nazzi, T

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Health and Life Sciences\Department of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health

Dates

Year of publication: 2015
Date of RADAR deposit: 2016-02-09


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License


Related resources

This RADAR resource is the Accepted Manuscript of Delayed acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic dependencies

Details

  • Owner: Rosa Teira Paz
  • Collection: Outputs
  • Version: 1 (show all)
  • Status: Live
  • Views (since Sept 2022): 342