Interaction between phonological and lexical development of Putonghua-speaking children

The paper investigates the interaction between phonological and lexical development among four Putonghua-speaking children between first-word and fifty-word stages. Using longitudinal recordings of four children's spontaneous speech collected over one year, this paper analyses the shared phonemic inventories both in the children's target words and their realisations during four-word, ten-word, twenty-word, thirty-word and fifty-word stages. It is found that children's vocabulary at four-word and ten-word stages are primarily words in syllable shapes of CV (consonant and vowel) and consist of stop or nasal consonants and open vowels. While the number of consonants and vowels in their target words begins to expand rapidly over the next twenty-word and thirty-word stages, the size of the target phonemic inventories exceeds significantly that of productive phonemic inventories. However, by the time when the children reach the fifty-word stage, there are significant individual variations as to the size of phonemic inventories and speed of development. The comparison of shared words among the children's production at different stages shows a clear preference for words with certain phonological features, i.e. syllable shapes CV or V, stop and nasal consonants and open vowels. These results support the argument that lexical and phonological development, while following their own paths of development, interact with each other in both directions in early age. Lexical development is influenced by phonological selection and phonological development is driven to some extent by the need of learning new words