Early Word Recognition in Sentence Context: French and English 24-Month-Olds' Sensitivity to Sentence-Medial Mispronunciations and Assimilations

Recent work has shown that young children can use fine phonetic detail during the recognition of isolated and sentence-final words from early in lexical development. The present study investigates 24-month-olds' word recognition in sentence-medial position in two experiments using an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, French toddlers detect word-final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., <i>bu<b>z</b></i> [by<b>z</b>] for <i>bu<b>s</b></i> [by<b>s</b>] “bus”), and they compensate for native voicing assimilations (e.g., <i>bu<b>z</b> devant toi</i> [bu<b>zd</b>əvɑ̃twa] “bus in front of you”) in the middle of sentences. Similarly, English toddlers detect word-final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., <i>shee<b>b</b></i> for <i>shee<b>p</b></i>) in Experiment 2, but they do not compensate for illicit voicing assimilations (e.g., <i>shee<b>b th</b>ere</i>). Thus, French and English 24-month-olds can take into account fine phonetic detail even if words are presented in the middle of sentences, and French toddlers show language-specific compensation abilities for pronunciation variation caused by native voicing assimilation.