Højen Anders, Madsen Thomas O, Bleses Dorthe
School of Communication and Culture and TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus V, Denmark.
Department of Language, Culture, History and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
Phonetica. 2023 Aug 3;80(5):309-328. doi: 10.1515/phon-2023-2001. Print 2023 Oct 26.
Although several studies initially supported the proposal by Nespor et al. (Nespor, Marina, Marcela Peña & Jacques Mehler. 2003. On the different roles of vowels and consonants in speech processing and language acquisition. 2. 221-247) that consonants are more informative than vowels in lexical processing, a more complex picture has emerged from recent research. Current evidence suggests that infants initially show a vowel bias in lexical processing and later transition to a consonant bias, possibly depending on the characteristics of the ambient language. Danish infants have shown a vowel bias in word learning at 20 months-an age at which infants learning French or Italian no longer show a vowel bias but rather a consonant bias, and infants learning English show no bias. The present study tested whether Danish 20-month-olds also have a vowel bias when recognizing words. Specifically, using the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm, we tested whether Danish infants were more likely to ignore or accept consonant than vowel mispronunciations when matching familiar words with pictures. The infants successfully matched correctly pronounced familiar words with pictures but showed no vowel or consonant bias when matching mispronounced words with pictures. The lack of a bias for Danish vowels or consonants in familiar word recognition adds to evidence that lexical processing biases are language-specific and may additionally depend on developmental age and perhaps task difficulty.
尽管多项研究最初支持了内斯波尔等人（内斯波尔，玛丽娜，玛塞拉·佩尼亚和雅克·梅勒。2003年。论元音和辅音在言语加工和语言习得中的不同作用。2. 221 - 247）提出的观点，即在词汇加工中辅音比元音信息量大，但最近的研究呈现出更为复杂的情况。目前的证据表明，婴儿在词汇加工最初表现出对元音的偏好，之后可能根据周围语言的特点转变为对辅音的偏好。丹麦婴儿在20个月大时在单词学习中表现出对元音的偏好——在这个年龄，学习法语或意大利语的婴儿不再表现出对元音的偏好，而是对辅音的偏好，而学习英语的婴儿则没有偏好。本研究测试了20个月大的丹麦婴儿在识别单词时是否也存在对元音的偏好。具体而言，我们使用跨通道优先注视范式，测试丹麦婴儿在将熟悉的单词与图片匹配时，是否更倾向于忽略或接受辅音发音错误而非元音发音错误。婴儿能够成功地将发音正确的熟悉单词与图片匹配，但在将发音错误的单词与图片匹配时，没有表现出对元音或辅音的偏好。在熟悉单词识别中对丹麦元音或辅音缺乏偏好，这进一步证明了词汇加工偏好是特定于语言的，并且可能还取决于发育年龄以及或许任务难度。
