Summary: N O T E
Phonological neighbourhoods in the
developing lexicon*
JEFFRY A. COADY
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A N D
RICHARD N. ASLIN
University of Rochester
(Received 6 March 2001. Revised 9 July 2002)
A B S T R A C T
Structural analyses of developing lexicons have provided evidence for
both children's holistic lexical representations and sensitivity to pho-
netic segments. In the present investigation, neighbourhood analyses
of two children's (age 3;6) expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an
adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-
weighted counts, neighbourhood size was calculated as the proportion
of the lexicon to which each target word is similar, to normalize for
vocabulary size differences. These analyses revealed that children's
lexicons contain more similar sounding words than previous analyses
indicated. Further, neighbourhoods appear denser earlier in develop-

Source: Aslin, Richard N. - Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester

Collections: Biology and Medicine