The role of geminates in infants' early word production and word-form recognition.

Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have 10been found to ‘overselect’ and ‘overproduce’ these consonants in early 11words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant. A 12production study with thirty Italian children recorded at ; and ; 13strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. To test the hypothesis 14that it is the salience of the medial geminate that detracts attention 15from the initial consonant we conducted three experiments with 16-month-old Italian infants. We first established baseline word-form 17recognition for untrained familiar trochaic disyllables and then tested 18for word-form recognition, separately for words with geminates and 19singletons, after changing the initial consonant to create nonwords 20from both familiar and rare forms. Familiar words with geminates 21were recognized despite the change, words with singletons were not. 22The findings indicate that a feature occurring later in the word affects 23initial consonant production and perception, which supports the 24whole-word phonology model.