morphological and distributional criteria

Both production and perception data are presented. In this paper we use corpus data to investigate whether there are regularities in the distribution of the voicing alternation in Dutch child-directed speech, that is, whether voicing alternations are more or less frequent in a given phonological context, and experimental data to test whether these regularities play a role in children’s ability to establish accurate lexical representations of voicing alternations in morphological paradigms. However, many studies show that distributional statistics, the likelihood of segments occurring in a given sequence, play a role in (early) language acquisition and processing (e.g., Jusczyk et al., 1993, 1994 Mattys and Jusczyk, 2001). Non-allophonic morphophonological alternations, such as the Dutch voicing alternation (e.g., the final of bed ‘bed’ is voiced in its plural form, bedden ), are difficult for children to acquire, in part because they are unpredictable ( Van Wijk, 2007 Van de Vijver and Baer-Henney, 2011 Zamuner et al., 2011). However, distributional properties do not play a role in children’s sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing in a Preferential Looking Task in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1 Dutch 3-year-olds’ production accuracy in a plural-elicitation task is shown to be sensitive to the distributional statistics. A corpus study of child-directed speech establishes that the likelihood of a stem-final obstruent alternating is somewhat predictable on the basis of the phonological properties of the stem. This study investigates whether voicing alternations are predictable from the child’s input, and whether children can make use of this information. In fact, the presence or absence of a voicing alternation is partly predictable if the phonological context of the word is taken into account, and adults have been shown to use this information ( Ernestus and Baayen, 2003). This has previously been attributed to their unpredictability. Morphophonological alternations, such as the voicing alternation that arises in a morphological paradigm due to final-devoicing in Dutch, are notoriously difficult for children to acquire.

Morphological and distributional criteria