Teickner, C. 1, 2 , Becker, A. 2 & Friedrich, C. K. 1, 2
1 Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
2 Universität Hamburg
Our previous work suggested different developmental trajectories of detailed and rough prosodic and phonemic processing in infancy (Becker, Schild & Friedrich, WILD 2013; Teickner, Becker, Schild & Friedrich, WILD 2015). Here we further investigate those trajectories for the processing of early-learned German words. We realised prosodic and phonemic variation in word onset priming across six conditions. Prime-target overlap in prosody and phonemes varied orthogonally according to the following scheme: 1. Complete overlap, e.g., MA-MAma; 2. Phoneme overlap, but stress variation, e.g., ma-MAma; 3. Initial phoneme variation, but stress overlap, e.g., NA-MAma; 4. Initial phoneme variation and stress variation, e.g., na-MAma; 5. Phoneme mismatch, but stress overlap, e.g., VO-MAma and 6. Phoneme mismatch and stress variation, e.g., vo-MAma. Event-Related Potentials replicate detailed phonemic and prosodic processing three months after birth and rough phonemic and prosodic processing six months after birth. Again, there was evidence for parallel rough and detailed speech processing nine months after birth. Our results are further evidence for separate processing of phonemes and prosody. Yet in contrast to previous studies we did not find any interactions between those systems across the first year of life.