Phonological Learning Influences Label-Object Mapping in Toddlers

Abstract

Purpose Infants rapidly acquire the sound patterns that characterize their native language. Knowledge of native language phonological cues facilitates learning new words that are consistent with these patterns. However, little is known about how newly acquired phonological knowledge-regularities that children are in the process of learning-affects novel word learning. The current experiment was designed to determine whether exposure to a novel phonological pattern affects subsequent novel word learning. Method Two-year-olds ( n = 41) were familiarized with a list of novel words that followed a simple phonotactic regularity. Following familiarization, toddlers were taught 4 novel label-object pairs. Two of the labels were consistent with the novel regularity, and 2 of the labels were inconsistent with the regularity. Results Toddlers with smaller vocabularies learned all of the novel label-object pairings, whereas toddlers with larger vocabularies only learned novel label-object pairings that were consistent with the novel phonological regularity. Conclusion These findings demonstrate that newly learned phonological patterns influence novel word learning and highlight the role of individual differences in toddlers' representations of candidate word forms.

Figure 1.

Images and names for the four novel objects used in the current experiment. The images are all from the Novel Object & Unusual Name Database (Horst & Hout, 2016).

Figure 2.

Empirical log odds of fixating the target object as a function of time (in milliseconds) since the onset of the target word and condition (novel label that was either consistent or inconsistent with the novel phonological regularity). Data points are the observed behavioral data (averaged across participants). The lines represent the growth curve fits, and the ribbons around the lines represent ± 1 SE. The dotted horizontal line at 0 represents chance (i.e., equal probability of fixating the target vs. the distractor object).

Figure 3.

Mean proportion of fixations to the target novel object on test trials averaged across the critical window (600–2,100 ms) as a function of condition (novel label that was consistent or inconsistent with the novel phonological regularity). Data points represent the proportion for each toddler averaged across trials. Error bars represent ± 1 SE. The dashed horizontal line represents chance (i.e., 50% or equal looking to both the target novel object and the distractor familiar object).