British infants' use of vowels and consonants in word learning tasks

Floccia, Caroline and Goslin, Jeremy (2017). British infants' use of vowels and consonants in word learning tasks. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-851341

It has been proposed that vowels and consonants play distinct roles in language, with vowels tending to carry intonation and grammar and consonants conveying the meaning of words (Nespor et al., 2003). Whilst this distinction appears relatively clearcut in experimental behaviour with adults its developmental origin is a matter of considerable conjecture, with far reaching implications to our understanding of language acquisition.
Three main hypotheses have been suggested to account for this asymmetry. The first hypothesis posits that it is a property of the linguistic system, whilst the second indicates that the relative roles of consonants and vowels is driven by the disparities in their acoustic properties. In the final hypothesis the asymmetry arises from differences in the stochastic distribution of vowels and consonants for a particular language.

In this project we will directly compare the processing of vowels and consonants between adult, toddler, and infant listeners of English and French. As there are considerable differences in the distribution and acoustic properties of vowel and consonants between these languages we will be able to judge the relative merits of the competing hypotheses by tracking the asymmetry at different stages of language acquisition.

Data description (abstract)

This data collection contains data from three experiments looking at word learning in toddlers aged 16 to 23 months, supporting a published paper (Floccia et al. 2014). Each child was presented with 8 trials in which she has to learn two made-up words differing by one consonant or one vowel.

All experiments with toddlers were conducted either using object manipulation tasks, or computer-controlled procedures with eye-trackers in both sites. The research found that English toddlers at 16 or 23 months did not show evidence of a consonant bias when tested in an interactive word learning situation, contrary to well-established results in French toddlers at the same age.

Data creators: