HESP Seminar: Katie Van Holzen (HESP)

Title: Consonant and vowel processing over development in the French-learning infant

Abstract: As a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes in Paris, France, my research focused on the role of consonants and vowels in lexical processing during infancy. Specifically, I investigated the development of a bias for consonantal information in lexical processing (C-bias; Nazzi, Poltrock, & Von Holzen, 2016) in French-learning infants. The first study examined the preference for consonant or vowel mispronunciations of infants' first name recognition. Both 5- and 8-month-olds preferred listening to a vowel mispronunciation, but 11-month-olds preferred listening to a consonant mispronunciation of their first name, establishing a shift from a preference for vocalic information at 8 and to consonantal information 11 months. In a second study, we investigated consonant and vowel processing in newly segmented words using ERPs. At 8 months, infants were sensitive to onset consonant, but not medial vowel or coda consonant mispronunciations of newly segmented words. Furthermore, the ERP amplitude polarity of infants' segmentation response (negative or positive), predicted their productive vocabulary growth, replicating the results of previous studies (Junge et al., 2012; 2014, Kooijman et al., 2013).