The Developmental Origins of the Consonant Bias in Lexical Processing
- Consonants have been proposed to carry more of the weight of lexical processing than vowels. This consonant bias has consistently been found in adults and has been proposed to facilitate early language acquisition. We explore the origins of this bias over the course of development and in infants learning different languages. Although the consonant bias was originally thought to be present at birth, evidence suggests that it arises from the early stages of phonological and (pre-)lexical acquisition. We discuss two theories that account for the acquisition of the consonant bias: the lexical and acoustic-phonetic hypotheses.
| Author details: | Thierry NazziORCiD, Silvana Poltrock, Katie Von Holzen |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721416655786 |
| ISSN: | 0963-7214 |
| ISSN: | 1467-8721 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Current directions in psychological science |
| Publisher: | Sage Publ. |
| Place of publishing: | Thousand Oaks |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first publication: | 2016 |
| Publication year: | 2016 |
| Release date: | 2020/03/22 |
| Tag: | consonant bias; cross-linguistic differences; language acquisition; lexical development |
| Volume: | 25 |
| Number of pages: | 6 |
| First page: | 291 |
| Last Page: | 296 |
| Funding institution: | Agence Nationale de la Recherche [ANR-09-FRBR-015, ANR-13-BSH2-0004]; Labex "Empirical Foundations of Linguistics" [ANR-10-LABX-0083] |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Exzellenzbereich Kognitionswissenschaften |
