Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations |
| Author: | LouAnn Gerken |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.u.arizona.edu/~gerken/ |
| Institution: | University of Arizona |
| Author: | Diane K. Ohala |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | University of Arizona |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition; Phonology; Psycholinguistics |
| Abstract: | The experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language properties, token and type frequency, as they contribute to phonotactic learning. Token frequency is the raw number of exposures children have to a particular pattern; type frequency refers to a count of abstract entities, such as unique words. Our results suggest that children's production accuracy is most sensitive to a combination of type and token frequency: children were able to generalize a target phonotactic sequence to a new word when familiarized with multiple word-types across tokens from multiple talkers, but not when presented with either word-types with no talker variability or multiple talker-tokens of a single word. |
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This article appears in Journal of Child Language Vol. 38, Issue 5, which you can read on Cambridge's site . |
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