1. Lexical and phonological organization in children: evidence from repetition tasks
- Author
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Munson, Benjamin, Swenson, Cyndie L., and Manthei, Shayla C.
- Subjects
Linguistics ,Lexical phonology ,Language acquisition ,Memory in children - Abstract
This study examined the structure of children's mental lexicons through performance on 2 short experimental tasks, 1 in which children repeated familiar monosyllabic real words varying in neighborhood density and 1 in which they repeated CVC nonwords varying in phonotactic probability. Two groups of typically developing children with mean ages of 4;3 (years; months; n = 16) and 7;2 (n = 15) participated. In the group of younger children, offset-to-onset response latencies were not systematically affected by lexicality, phonotactic probability, or neighborhood density. Onset-to-onset latencies showed an effect of phonotactic probability on nonword repetition. Children in the older group repeated high-density real words with longer latencies than low-density real words. They also repeated high-probability nonwords with shorter latencies than low-probability nonwords. This was true for both the onset-to-onset andoffset-to-onset repetition latencies. Children in both age groups repeated vowels embedded in high-probability nonwords with shorter durations than vowels embedded in low-probability nonwords. These findings suggest that lexical competition and phonological facilitation emerge in development and that the rate of development is different for different dependent measures. KEY WORDS: phonological neighborhood density, phonotactic probability, nonword repetition, real-word repetition, children, Recent psycholinguistic investigations have converged on two conclusions regarding lexical and phonological representations in memory. The first is that the lexicon is organized systematically, based on the similarity of individual [...]
- Published
- 2005