Coronal underspecification as an emerging property in the development of speech processing

Althaus, Nadja ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4888-1508, Lahiri, Aditi and Plunkett, Kim (2024) Coronal underspecification as an emerging property in the development of speech processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition. ISSN 0278-7393

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Abstract

Is the developing lexicon phonologically detailed or are representations underspecified? Experimental results from toddlers suggest phonological specificity. By contrast, the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) theory (Lahiri & Reetz, 2010; Lahiri 2018), motivated by evidence such as the cross-linguistic prevalence of phenomena such as coronal assimilation (rainbow → rai[m]bow), proposes that coronal sounds are unspecified for place of articulation even in the adult lexicon. FUL therefore predicts that asymmetries in mispronunciation sensitivity are also present in the developing lexicon. Recent research (Ren et al., 2019) has rejected this, reporting similar sensitivity to mispronunciation of coronals and non-coronals at 19 months. Using a more sensitive experimental paradigm, we provide new evidence demonstrating a lack of asymmetries at 18 months, but mispronunciation sensitivity for coronals disappears by 24 months. In an intermodal preferential looking study, growth curve analysis shows that 18-month-olds are sensitive to misprounciations of words with a coronal (e.g., duck vs. *buck) and non-coronal (e.g., bird vs. *dird) onset. At 24 months, mispronunciations of coronal-onset words were treated just like the accurate pronunciations. We conclude that coronals are underspecified in the developing lexicon at 24 months. We propose a model under which initial representations are phonetic in nature and require exact acoustic input whereas phonological coronal underspecification at the lexical level emerges gradually as a result of exposure to variation in the input such as coronal assimilations that only become detectable patterns with growing lexical and segmentation skills.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability statement: The data are available at https://osf.io/5d2wr Funding information: This research was funded by a John Fell Grant (University of Oxford) to Aditi Lahiri and Kim Plunkett, by the EPSRC (Grant EPSRC EP/X026035/1, personal investigator: Aditi Lahiri) and the ESRC (Grant CQR01830, personal investigator: Kim Plunkett and Nuria Sebastian-Galles), and by the Winkler Fellowship in Experimental Psychology (St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford) to Nadja Althaus.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	mispronunciation sensitivity,phonological specificity,phonological development,phonological representations,eye tracking,growth curve analysis,developmental and educational psychology,experimental and cognitive psychology,language and linguistics,3* ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200/3204
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Jun 2024 16:30
Last Modified:	12 Aug 2024 08:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/95410
DOI:	10.1037/xlm0001367

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