Phonemic and sub-phonemic neighbourhood similarities in young children's lexicons

Several researchers have suggested that the phonological representations of children are less detailed than those of adults, perhaps because their lexicons are not as densely populated with similar sounding words (Charles-Luce & Luce, 1990). However, these analyses are based on estimates of expressive vocabulary, which underestimates the total number of words they must represent. This paper presents the results of an analysis of neighbourhood densities of words within an average child's receptive vocabulary at four years, estimated using files from the CHILDES database. Neighbourhood densities will be analysed both in terms of phonemic similarities and in terms of shared phonetic features