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Children's phonological neighbourhoods: half empty or half full?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Christine A. Dollaghan
Christine A. Dollaghan*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
*
Department of Communication, 3347 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 257 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank Thomas Campbell, Amanda Walley and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions.

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