Word recognition in Italian infants

The aim of the present study is to investigate word recognition in Italian infants using lists of untrained isolated words. Since, in contrast with the other languages investigated so far, Italian first words may contain geminates in medial position (e.g. palla \u2017ball\u2018, mamma \u2017mother\u2018, bello \u2017nice, beautiful\u2018), it is possible here to investigate the effect of the presence of a geminate in medial position. Based on production studies of Finnish, where the onset consonant is often omitted, it has been suggested that medial geminates pull the child\u2018s attention away from the initial consonant (Vihman & Velleman, 2000), even if the first syllable is accented, as is the case in both Finnish and Italian as well as in English. According to this hypothesis, a change to the first consonant should not block infant word recognition, contrary to the clear findings for English. In Experiment 1 18 11-month-old infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure. Two phonotactically similar lists (familiar and unfamiliar) of 12 words each were composed, based on the Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates questionnaire (Caselli & Casadio, 1995). Six words in each list had a geminate in medial position. The infants looked longer in response to the familiar (M = 7.20; SD = 1.73) than to the unfamiliar words (M = 4.94; SD = 1.78, t(16) = 6.89; p <.001), replicating the base\u2013line findings for the other languages. A second group of 18 infants participated in Experiment 2. In this case, all of the words in the two lists (familiar and unfamiliar) had a geminate in medial position. In both lists the first consonant of each word was changed. Preliminary results indicate that the infants respond with longer looking to the familiar words despite the change to the first consonant. Since onset-consonant change does not block word-form recognition in this case, the findings of Experiment 2 appear to support the hypothesis that medial geminates are sufficiently salient to draw infant attention away from the onset consonant, even in a language with a trochaic stress pattern

Early word form in production and perception: the role of geminates

Early words produced in languages with word-medial geminates, like Finnish or Italian, tend to coalesce around the geminates: Their slow articulation is easy and their duration makes for perceptual salience. Child onset-consonant omission is also common here, even under initial-syllable accent. We tested the hypothesis that the medial geminates\u2019 salience detracts from child attention to word onset. Experimental studies have shown that by 11 months infants recognize untrained word forms familiar from everyday life. However, we observe cross-linguistic differences: Change to the onset consonant has a larger effect in English, with initial-syllable stress, than in French, with second-syllable accent. If medial geminates may lead to word representations, Italian infants should recognize such words even if with changed onset in the accented syllable. Three experiments tested 11-month-olds (20-21 each). In (baseline) Exp. 1 isolated words likely to be familiar (bello \u2018beautiful\u2019) were contrasted with formally similar words unlikely to be familiar (flotta 'fleet'). The infants responded more to the familiar words. In Exp. 2 all words had a medial geminate, but with changed onset consonant. Infants responded to the familiar words despite the changes, suggesting that the word shape as a whole affected word recognition, given the infants\u2019 diminished attention to the onsets. Exp. 3 changed the onset in medial-singleton words. Here infants failed to respond more to the familiar words, showing sensitivity to onset change when no geminates occur later. The findings thus support the English and French evidence that not all aspects of a word are equally well represented. Perceptual salience of an element later in a word may account for the common omission of the onset consonants, also seen in iambic languages

The role of accentual pattern in early lexical representation

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Hallé & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical items than to a phonetically comparable rare list, but 9-month-olds did not. Reversing the stress pattern of the familiar items failed to block word-form recognition in 11-month-olds, although a time-course analysis showed that it delayed the infant response. Changing the initial consonant of English words did block word recognition while change to the second consonant did not. Time-course analyses of both the English and the original French data showed that altering the consonant of the unaccented syllable delays word-form recognition in both languages while change to the accented syllable has a stronger effect in English than in French

The relation between perception and production in the transition into language

Period of award: October 1999 to September 2002. Includes bibliographical referencesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:3739. 0605(000238236) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo