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’ 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 <VCCV> 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 ‘beautiful’) 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’ 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.