15 Mar 2005

Mits Ota

Infant perception studies suggest that the capacity to track phonological pattern frequency is present as early as 8 months (Jusczyk, Luce, & Charles-Luce, 1994; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). However, it is still not clear how this precocious ability eventually leads to the type of probabilistic phonological knowledge we find in adult speakers. One way to investigate this question is to look at frequency effects manifested in the phonology of slightly older children. To this end, this study has examined different types of frequency effects on the truncation rates in words produced by 1- to 2-year-old Japanese-speaking children. The analysis so far suggests that the statistical information most relevant to the prosodic size and shape of their word production is the token frequencies of similar prosodic structures in the input. Given the bulk of evidence indicating that adult speaker's knowledge of phonological well-formedness is closely tied to structural *type* frequency (e.g., Vitevich, Luce, Charles-Luce & Kemmerer, 1997; Hay, Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 2003), this finding suggests an interesting difference in statistical induction between young children and adults.

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