Majorano, M. 1 & Vihman, M. 2
1 Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, University of Verona, Italy
2 Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, UK
Experimental studies in three languages have shown that 11-month-old infants recognize word forms familiar from everyday life (for French, Hallé & Boysson-Bardies, 1994: for English, Vihman et al., 2004; and for Dutch, Swingley, 2005). The aim of the present study is to investigate word recognition in Italian infants using lists of untrained isolated words. Based on production studies of Finnish, where the onset consonant is often omitted, it has been suggested that medial geminates pull the child?s attention away from the initial consonant, even if the first syllable is accented, as is the case in both Finnish and Italian as well as in English. According to this hypothesis, a change to the first consonant should not block infant word recognition. In Experiment 1, 18 11-month-old infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure. Two phonotactically similar lists (familiar and unfamiliar) of 12 words each were composed. Six words in each list had a geminate in medial position. The infants looked longer in response to the familiar than to the unfamiliar words [t(16) = 6.89; p <.001], replicating the base-line findings for the other languages. A second group of 18 infants participated in Experiment 2. In this case, all of the words in the two lists (familiar and unfamiliar) had a geminate in medial position. In both lists the first consonant of each word was changed. Preliminary results indicate that the infants respond with longer looking to the familiar words despite the change to the first consonant. Since onset-consonant change does not block word-form recognition in this case, the findings of Experiment 2 appear to support the hypothesis that medial geminates are sufficiently salient to draw infant attention away from the onset consonant, even in a language with a trochaic stress pattern.