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A phonological, lexical, and phonetic analysis of the new words that young children imitate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2018

Tania S. Zamuner  and
Andrea Thiessen
Tania S. Zamuner*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
Andrea Thiessen*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
*
tzamuner@uottawa.ca
andreathssn@gmail.com
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Abstract

As children learn language, they spontaneously imitate the speech of those around them. This article investigates the new words that five children imitated between 1 and 2 years of age. Children were more likely to imitate new words as they aged and as their productive language developed. After controlling for age, children also were more likely to imitate new words that were shorter and with high neighborhood densities, and that contained sounds the children had previously produced accurately. Together, the findings demonstrate that both the patterns of the target words and children's productive abilities are predictors of children's imitative speech. This supports models of language development where there are influences stemming not only from phonological and lexical representations, but also from phonetic representations.

Résumé

Au cours de leur développement langagier, les enfants imitent spontanément le discours des gens qui les entourent. La présente recherche s'intéresse à certains mots nouveaux imités par cinq enfants âgés de 1 à 2 ans. Les enfants imitent plus souvent les mots nouveaux avec l'avancée en âge et avec le développement de leurs compétences en production. Après avoir tenu compte du facteur ‘âge’, les enfants sont également plus enclins à imiter des mots nouveaux courts et avec une haute densité de voisinage, et contenant des sons que les enfants avaient produits correctement auparavant. Les résultats montrent que les modèles lexicaux des mots cibles et les capacités productives des enfants peuvent prédire leur discours imitatif. Cela soutient les théories de développement linguistique selon lesquelles les influences proviennent non seulement des représentations phonologiques et lexicales, mais également des représentations phonétiques.

Keywords

language developmentspeech productionlexiconphoneticsimitationdéveloppement langagierproduction de la parolelexiquephonétiqueimitation
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 63 , Issue 4: Phonetic/phonological development and input characteristics in early lexical acquisition/Le développement phonétique/phonologique et les caractéristiques de l'apport linguistique dans l'acquisition lexicale précoce , December 2018 , pp. 609 - 632
Copyright
© Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2018 

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Footnotes

This research was supported by a SSHRC grant awarded to Zamuner. We thank Cynthia Core, Yvan Rose, Sophia Stevenson, Ana Sofia Niembro, Katherine Lam, and anonymous reviewers for helpful input and feedback.

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