Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University.
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Sep;45(9):e13022. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13022.
There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English-acquiring 30-month-olds. The children participated in a visual world looking-while-listening task, in which their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30-month-olds exhibit lexical-level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size.
人们普遍认为成人词汇表现出词汇竞争。特别是，大量证据表明，与具有较少邻居的单词相比，具有更多语音相似邻居的单词的识别效率较低。这些影响在儿童词汇中何时以及如何出现尚不清楚。在当前的论文中，我们通过测试语音起始密度是否会在 100 名英语习得的 30 个月大的儿童的大样本中减慢词汇访问，来建立在先前研究的基础上。孩子们参加了一个视觉世界的听看任务，在这个任务中，他们的注意力被引导到电脑屏幕上的两个物体之一，同时记录他们的眼球运动。我们发现，起始邻居密度对词汇访问有中等程度的抑制作用的证据，并且有起始邻居密度和词汇量之间的交互作用的明确证据，对于词汇量较大的儿童，起始邻居密度的影响更大。结果表明，30 个月大的儿童的词汇表现出词汇水平的竞争，竞争随着词汇量的增加而增加。
