Jöhr, J. . & Zesiger, P.
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science. University of Geneva, Switzerland
Representations of the sounds of words are keys to access the lexicon, yet consonants appear to play the leading role in adults’ word recognition (Cutler et al, 2000). When it comes to infants’ word processing, mixed findings suggest that the consonant advantage develops late. Studies in Germanic languages with 12- to 24-month-olds report either a consonant-vowel symmetry (Swingley & Aslin, 2002; Mani & Plunkett, 2007), or a more accurate vocalic perception (Fikkert, 2010). In contrast, word learning experiments in French with 16- to 22-month-olds (Nazzi, 2009) suggest a consonantal bias. These contrastive results could reflect differences in language type (English/Dutch vs. French), but also in task complexity (word learning vs recognition), age range, and stimuli. The present study in French provides a systematic control of these factors using the same Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) task as most of the previous Germanic studies, and aims at unveiling the origins of these discrepancies.
Our two IPL experiments presented 14-, 18- and 23-month-olds (N=176) with two pictures of familiar objects (e.g. ball, car) along with a correct or incorrect pronunciation of the target. Mispronunciations of disyllabic words were created by manipulating phoneme class (Consonant/Vowel), position (1st/2nd syllable) and feature category (place/nasality/voicing). If toddlers are sensitive to mispronunciations (e.g. [malõ], [bẽlõ]), we expected longer and/or faster looks to the picture whose name was correctly pronounced ([balõ]).
All age groups demonstrated a robust sensitivity to consonantal modifications (p<.05), with a stronger effect for the second syllable’s onset. In the vowel condition, no main pronunciation effect was observed. The overall outcomes indicate that an early lexical discrepancy between these phonetic categories does exist, yet in regard to the language structure itself. We will discuss how the difference in sound distribution between French and Germanic languages could give rise to different developmental paths.