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Lexical Learning May Contribute to Phonetic Learning in Infants: A Corpus Analysis of Maternal Spanish
Author(s) -
Swingley Daniel,
Alarcon Claudia
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12620
Subject(s) - phonetics , lexicon , vowel , language acquisition , psychology , linguistics , inference , language development , computer science , word learning , artificial intelligence , speech recognition , natural language processing , vocabulary , developmental psychology , philosophy , mathematics education
In their first year, infants begin to learn the speech sounds of their language. This process is typically modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem in which phonetically similar speech‐sound tokens are grouped into phonetic categories by infants using their domain‐general inference abilities. We argue here that maternal speech is too phonetically variable for this account to be plausible, and we provide phonetic evidence from Spanish showing that infant‐directed Spanish vowels are more readily clustered over word types than over vowel tokens. The results suggest that infants’ early adaptation to native‐language phonetics depends on their word‐form lexicon, implicating a much wider range of potential sources of influence on infants’ developmental trajectories in language learning.