Skoruppa, K. 1 , Mani, N. 2 , Plunkett, K. 3 & Peperkamp, S. 4
1 U. of Essex
2 U. of Gottingen
3 U. of Oxford
4 LSCP, Paris
Infants and toddlers encode words with phonetic detail, as evidenced by their sensitivity to mispronunciations of words. To date, no mispronunciation study has tested the recognition of sentence-medial words, which might be particularly difficult because, firstly, these words are acoustically less salient, and, secondly, they can have phonetic variants due to across-word phonological processes. For instance, French has voice assimilation in obstruent clusters: the final /s/ of 'bus' 'bus' becomes voiced in 'bus direct' ('direct bus'), where it is followed by the voiced obstruent /d/, but not in 'bus marron' ('brown bus'), where it is followed by the sonorant /m/. Therefore, the form bu[z] is a legal variant of the word 'bus' in 'bu[z] direct' but a mispronunciation in 'bu[z] marron'. Using an IPL-paradigm and sentence-medial target words, we measured 24-month-olds' looking times towards two pictures shown side-by-side, one corresponding to the target word and the other depicting an unfamiliar object. In Experiment 1, French toddlers looked more towards the familiar object in the post-naming compared to the pre-naming phase following standard pronunciations (Regarde le bu[s] maintenant 'Look at the bus now'; t(31)=2.21, p<.04) and assimilations (Regarde le bu[z] devant toi 'Look at the bus in front of you'; t(31)=4.02, p<.001), but not following mispronunciations (Regarde le bu[z] maintenant 'Look at the *buz now'; t(31)<1). Experiment 2 shows that compensation for assimilation is language-specific: English toddlers, whose language does not have voice assimilation, looked more towards the familiar object in the post-naming compared to the pre-naming phase following standard pronunciations (Can you find the bu[s] now?; t(30)=4.41, p<.001), but not following mispronunciations (Can you find the bu[z] now?; t(30)=1.71, p=.098) or pseudo-assimilations (Can you find the bu[z] there?; t(30)=1.33, p>.1). Thus, both French and English 24-month-olds are sensitive to sentence-medial voicing mispronunciations, but only the French ones compensate for voice assimilation.