Rapid learning of minimally different words in five- to six-year-old children : effects of acoustic salience and hearing impairment

This study investigates the role of acoustic salience and hearing impairment in learning phonologically minimal pairs. Picture-matching and object-matching tasks were used to investigate the learning of consonant and vowel minimal pairs in five- to six-year-old deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI), and children of the same age with normal hearing (NH). In both tasks, the CI children showed clear difficulties with learning minimal pairs. The NH children also showed some difficulties, however, particularly in the picture-matching task. Vowel minimal pairs were learned more successfully than consonant minimal pairs, particularly in the object-matching task. These results suggest that the ability to encode phonetic detail in novel words is not fully developed at age six and is affected by task demands and acoustic salience. CI children experience persistent difficulties with accurately mapping sound contrasts to novel meanings, but seem to benefit from the relative acoustic salience of vowel sounds.