Early phonetic patterns and novel word learning

In recent years studies have reported an early relationship between infants’ production of vocal patterns and their perceptual processing of linguistic input (De Paolis et al., 2011). However, less attention has been given to a possible effect of infants’ early phonetic patterns (vocal motor schemes, VMS) on their ability to learn new words. The present study aimed to assess the relationship, if any, between children’s emerging phonetic abilities and their ability to learn trained nonwords. Thirty monolingual Italian-learning infants were observed with home recordings twice at around 11 months, to assess their consonant production. The children were then tested using an adaptation of the preferential looking paradigm, after training on nonwords associated with picture-book images of imaginary animals (over 5 sessions). Each child had to learn four nonwords, two containing sounds usually produced by infants (VMS-words) and two containing sounds not typically produced (nonVMS-words). The perceptual testing involved pairs of pictures included in the book (trained words) or not (foils) and the trained words were auditory presented (16 trials altogether). Looking times and number of responses in matched and unmatched conditions were assessed. Analysis showed that children who display stable, high-frequency production of labial stops (p/b) looked longer in response to the trained words with those consonants [t(28) = 2.5; p = .02] and recognised words with those consonants better [t(28) = 3.4; p <.01], compared to infants with lower production of those sounds. Furthermore, children with higher production of stable consonants overall looked longer, in matched conditions, to both VMS-nonwords and non-VMS-words [t(28) = 2.19; p =.04; t(28) = 2.17; p =.04]. These results support the idea of a specific link between early phonetic competence and the child’s ability to recognise trained new words.