School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK.
J Child Lang. 2013 Jun;40(3):539-66. doi: 10.1017/S0305000912000074. Epub 2012 Mar 27.
Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11-4 ; 0). The analysis took account of several lexical factors in addition to lexical input frequency, including the age of first production, production frequency, neighborhood density and number of phonemes. The results showed that lexical input frequency was a significant predictor of the age at which the accuracy level of cluster production in each word first reached 80%. The magnitude of the frequency effect differed across cluster types. Our findings indicate that some of the between-word variance found in the development of sound production can indeed be attributed to the frequency of words in the child's ambient language.
尽管人们常常假设儿童首先在经常听到的单词中学习产生新的音系模式，但支持这一说法的现有证据尚无定论。为了重新检验这个问题，我们对普罗维登斯语料库（0; 11-4; 0）中三个儿童所产生的词首辅音簇进行了生存分析。该分析除了词汇输入频率外，还考虑了几个词汇因素，包括首次出现的年龄、出现频率、近邻密度和音素数量。结果表明，词汇输入频率是预测每个单词的辅音簇产生准确性首次达到 80%的年龄的重要指标。频率效应的大小因簇类型而异。我们的研究结果表明，在语音产生发展过程中发现的一些词间差异确实可以归因于儿童周围语言中单词的频率。
