The role of consonants and vowels in early wordform recognition in Akan-learning multilingual infants

Infants’ sensitivity to the phonological properties that contrast word meanings in their native language (namely, consonants and vowels in all languages, but also lexical tones in tone languages) is a crucial ability implicated in lexical acquisition and processing. It has been proposed that some phonological information is more important in early lexical acquisition than others (Nespor et al., 2003), giving rise to phonological biases in early lexical acquisition and processing. This hypothesis argues for the presence of a consonantal bias (henceforth, C-bias) in lexical acquisition and processing. Several studies exploring this C-bias in lexical processing in adults and infants have shown that it is present in many languages, although it may not be present in all languages, particularly not in tone languages (see Nazzi & Cutler, 2019, for a review). In testing the C-bias in wordform recognition, previous research has investigated infants’ sensitivity to mispronunciations of familiar words that differ in one feature of their consonants or vowels (e.g., French: Poltrock & Nazzi, 2015; English: Ratnage et al., 2023). Findings from these studies show that while French-learning 11-month-olds are more sensitive to a consonant than a vowel change (showing a C-bias), English-learning 11-month-olds are equally sensitive to both kinds of information, suggesting crosslinguistic differences. Findings from studies on toddlers learning Asian tone languages (Chen et al., 2021; Wewalaarachchi et al., 2017) suggest that the presence of tones in Asian languages leads to a reversed vowel-bias (henceforth, V-bias). To test whether a V-bias is more generally found in tone languages, the present study extends this research to an understudied African tone language, Akan (with lexical tones carried by vowels), and multilingual infants learning tone languages alongside a non-tone language (e.g., English).