Children's phonological neighbourhoods: half empty or half full?
- 1 June 1994
- journal article
- editorial
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 21 (2) , 257-271
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900009260
Abstract
Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) found smaller phonological similarity neighbourhoods in five- and seven-year-old children's expressive lexicons than in an adult receptive lexicon, a finding they interpreted as evidence that children need not employ fine-grained auditory perceptual analyses in lexical processing. In the present investigation, neighbourhood sizes were calculated for an expressive lexicon derived from two vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;0 to 3;0 (Rescorla, 1989; Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989). Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbour; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbours. Very young children must have access to reasonably detailed phonological information in order to create and distinguish among such phonologically similar lexical entries.Keywords
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