Learning New Words Affects Nonword Pronunciation in Children

Abstract

In two experiments we examined how children's nonword pronunciations are influenced by learning words. In Experiment 1, children pronounced nonwords before and after learning words sharing orthographic rimes with the nonwords. These rimes varied in spelling-to-sound consistency and regularity. Children's nonword pronunciations were more sensitive to consistency and regularity after instruction than before. Experiment 2 expanded upon Experiment 1 by modifying the instruction to highlight regularity and consistency in rime unit neighborhoods and by including both younger (M age = 7.6) and older (M age = 9.92) participants. After instruction, Experiment 2 participants demonstrated greater sensitivity to rime unit consistency and regularity than Experiment 1 participants. In both experiments, the children, especially the younger participants, made more adultlike pronunciations after instruction than before. We conclude that learning words varying in consistency and regularity increased the children's sensitivity to these properties.

Notes

¹By the term “analogy,” we are referring to a pronunciation that is based on lexical knowledge about rime units. However, the psychological mechanisms involved may or may not employ localist lexical representations. Similarly, pronunciations that are based on GPCs may or may not involve rules. Instead of rules, grapheme-to-phoneme-based pronunciations may also be based on probabilistic properties about the relationship between graphemes and phonemes.

²Note that in some cases a reader could apply an analogy strategy that produces a pronunciation that appears to be based on GPC rules. For example, if jind were pronounced with a short /I/, it is possible that an analogy to wind = /wInd/ produced that pronunciation. In other words, when a “regular” pronunciation is given for a nonword, and if at least one regular word occurs in the nonword's neighborhood, an analogy strategy cannot be ruled out. However, if an “irregular” pronunciation is provided, an analogy strategy can be confirmed.

³Regular consistent nonwords contained orthographic rimes always pronounced according to GPC rules (e.g., ract). Ambiguous nonwords (e.g., roul) contained rimes associated equally with irregular and regular mappings (e.g., foul, soul). Irregular nonwords (e.g., choll) contained rimes that are usually (but not always) irregular. Finally, NRA nonwords (e.g., moup) had rimes associated exclusively with irregular words. We should make it clear that when we refer to regular or irregular nonwords, we are referring to the regularity in the pronunciation pattern of the rime unit when it appears in words. We acknowledge that because we are using nonwords, there are no defined pronunciation patterns for these letter strings and, thus, a nonword cannot be regular or irregular per se.