Turner, J. , Delle Luche, C. , Gunning, L. , Jenkins, H. & Floccia, C.
Plymouth University
Adult studies show that consonants and vowels play different roles in language processing, with consonants being favourably involved in lexical processing, and vowels more important for grammar and prosody (Nespor et al, 2003). Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) studies with English-speaking infants as young as 14-month-olds show that infants are equally sensitive to consonant and vowel mispronunciations in familiar words (Mani & Plunkett, 2007; Swingley & Aslin, 2002). However, in word-learning tasks French-learning infants are only sensitive to consonant contrasts and not vowel contrasts (14 months in Zeziger & Johr, 2011). In a similar task, a recent study with English toddlers aged 16 to 23 months suggests that they might be particularly sensitive to coda consonants in CVC items (Floccia et al., under review). This could explain the discrepancy between the English and the French results, as mispronunciation detection studies in English toddlers comparing consonants and vowels have always focused on onset consonants rather than codas. Thus, the matter of a differential role of consonants and vowels in lexical development in English-learning infants is not so clear-cut. Using a classic IPL procedure and stimuli similar to Mani and Plunkett (2007), we presented 20 month old infants with two pictures of familiar objects (e.g. ball, cat) along with a correct or an incorrect pronunciation of the monosyllabic target word. Mispronunciations were created by manipulating the phonemic class (consonant/vowel) and the consonant location (onset/coda). Halfway through data collection, the results currently show that infants look longer at familiar objects when presented with the correct pronunciations compared with mispronunciations, with no asymmetry between onset consonant, vowel and coda consonant mispronunciation detection. If these results were to be confirmed, they would strengthen the findings that English-learning children do not show a consonant bias in word processing, irrespective of the location of the mismatching target phoneme.