Buckler Helen, Fikkert Paula
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga ON, Canada.
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2016 May 3;7:540. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00540. eCollection 2016.
Morphophonological alternations, such as the voicing alternation that arises in a morphological paradigm due to final-devoicing in Dutch, are notoriously difficult for children to acquire. This has previously been attributed to their unpredictability. In fact, the presence or absence of a voicing alternation is partly predictable if the phonological context of the word is taken into account, and adults have been shown to use this information (Ernestus and Baayen, 2003). This study investigates whether voicing alternations are predictable from the child's input, and whether children can make use of this information. A corpus study of child-directed speech establishes that the likelihood of a stem-final obstruent alternating is somewhat predictable on the basis of the phonological properties of the stem. In Experiment 1 Dutch 3-year-olds' production accuracy in a plural-elicitation task is shown to be sensitive to the distributional statistics. However, distributional properties do not play a role in children's sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing in a Preferential Looking Task in Experiment 2.
形态音位交替，比如荷兰语中由于词尾清化在一个形态范例中出现的浊音交替，众所周知对儿童来说很难习得。这一点以前被归因于它们的不可预测性。事实上，如果考虑单词的音系环境，浊音交替的出现与否在一定程度上是可预测的，并且已有研究表明成年人会利用这一信息（欧内斯特斯和贝扬，2003）。本研究调查浊音交替是否能从儿童的输入中预测出来以及儿童是否能利用这一信息。一项针对儿童导向言语的语料库研究证实，词干末尾塞音交替的可能性在一定程度上可以根据词干的音系属性预测出来。在实验1中，荷兰3岁儿童在复数诱发任务中的产出准确性表现出对分布统计的敏感性。然而，在实验2的偏好注视任务中，分布属性在儿童对浊音发音错误的敏感性方面并未发挥作用。
