Junge, C. 1 , Benders, T. 2 & Levelt, C. 3
1 University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2 Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
3 Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands
Lexical neighbors are words that differ in one phoneme (e.g., 'pear'-'bear'). Infants have difficulties learning novel words that are minimal pairs (i.e., 'bin'-'din', Stager & Werker, 1997; Nazzi, 2005) or are lexical neighbors of familiar words (i.e., novel 'tog' - familiar 'dog', Swingley & Aslin, 2007). We do not know yet whether infants, like adults (Allopenna, Magnuson & Tanenhaus, 1998), find it difficult to recognize words in the presence of lexical neighbors. This study examines whether and how infant word recognition is affected by having a potential target that is a lexical neighbor of the actual target. We tested Dutch 18-month-olds in a cross-modal preferential-looking task, since in Dutch most toddlers understand two minimal-pair triplets: 'hand'-'hond'-'mond' (hand-dog-mouth) and 'bed'-'bad'-'bal' (bed-bath-ball; Junge, Cutler & Hagoort, 2012). This allowed us to test word recognition of these particular items when a phonological neighbor was present or not. Preliminary results (we coded 18/40 infants) showed that:1) Infants looked shorter at targets when the distracter was a neighbor rather than a non-neighbor (t[17]=2.47, p=.024); nevertheless, even with lexical neighbors, word recognition was significantly different from chance (t[17]=4.55, p<.001). 2) When the two pictures were lexical neighbors, infants had the weakest recognition when the disambiguating point was in the onset ('hond' vs. 'mond'), intermediate recognition for nucleus neighbors ('hond' vs. 'hand'), and strong recognition for coda neighbors ('bal' vs. 'bad'; F[1,49]=3.83, p=0.056). 3) When infants heard a non-present target ('hond') and saw its two lexical neighbors ('mond' and 'hand'), they preferred the target with the same vowel (i.e. 'mond'; t[17]=3.63, p=.002). Together, these results provide strong evidence that infants with small lexicons can recognize words in the presence of a lexical neighbor. However, recognition is hampered by the presence of a lexical neighbor, especially when the disambiguation point occurs earlier in the word.