Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Frequency often predicts when children will acquire unitsof language such as words or phones. An additionalpredictor of language development may be a phone’sfunctional load (FL), or the contrastive work a soundperforms in a language. A higher FL may correlate withearlier phone emergence in child speech as childrenselectively converge upon the most meaningful contrasts intheir input. This hypothesis is tested across fivetypologically diverse languages that vary by phoneinventory size and structure as well as word composition.Consonant FL was calculated over more than 390,000words of child-directed speech. Results demonstrate thatthe relationship of frequency and FL to speechdevelopment is dependent upon the language of exposure.Models fit to bootstrapped corpus data suggest thatfrequency may be the stronger of the two parameters.