Investigating developmental changes in phonological representation using the imitation paradigm

This study investigates the developmental changes in phonological representation, by examining the word- and phoneme-level specificity of phonetic imitation by children. Prevailing linguistic theories assume three levels of phonological representations: word, phoneme, and feature. Previous research suggests that phonological representations develop throughout childhood, and that phonological awareness develops from larger to smaller units (e.g., Edwards et al., 2004; Treiman & Zukowski, 1996). It has been shown that adult speakers implicitly imitate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech (e.g. Goldinger, 1998), and recently, Nielsen (2011) showed the sub-phonemic generalizability and word- and phoneme-level specificity of imitation, indicating that three levels of phonological representations simultaneously contribute to the observed patterns of phonetic imitation. In order to test whether young children manifest similar patterns of imitation and specificity, an experiment with a modified imitation paradigm with a picture-naming task was conducted, in which participants' VOT was compared before and after they were exposed to target speech with artificially increased VOT. Our results showed that 5 year-olds produced greater imitation than and 8 year-olds, while word-level specificity was greater for 8 year-olds. These results provide support for the continued development of phonological representations.