A protracted developmental trajectory for English-learning children’s detection of consonant mispronunciations in newly learned words

ABSTRACT

Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed evidence of learning the taught word. Adults’ target looking was reduced when the novel word was realized at test with a change in the voicing of the initial consonant, but children did not show any such decrement in target fixation. For both children and adults, most learners did not treat the phonologically distinct variant as a different word. Acoustic-phonetic variability during teaching did not have consistent effects. Thus, under conditions of intensive short-term training, 24- and 30-month-olds did not differentiate a newly learned word from a variant differing only in consonant voicing. High task complexity during training could explain why mispronunciation detection was weaker here than in some prior studies.

Acknowledgments

We are tremendously grateful to the parents, children, and adult participants who participated in this study. We thank members of the Infant Language Center at the University of Pennsylvania who assisted with tasks such as participant scheduling and testing, including Sara Clopton, Jane Park, Alba Tuninetti, Kristin Vindler Michaelson, and Rebecca McCue, or manuscript preparation, including Sophia Heiser and Anna Runova. Additional students from the Child Language Learning Center at Portland State University assisted with manuscript preparation, including Genesis Ocegueda Enciso, Josie Johnson, Katharine Ross, and Helena Sai.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available for download at https://doi.org/10.15760/sphr-data.01 (doi:10.15760/sphr-data.01).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2069026

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and NSF IGERT Trainee Fellowship grants to C.Q., the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health Award Number RL5GM118963 (which supported student research assistants working with C.Q.), NSF grant HSD-0433567 to Delphine Dahan and D.S., and NIH grant R01-HD049681 and NSF grant 1917608 to D.S. Research reported in this publication is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.