Very Young Children Learning German Notice the Incorrect Syllable Stress of Words

Syllable stress can help to quickly identify words in a language with variable stress placement like German. Here, we asked at what age incorrect syllable stress impairs language learners’ attempts to assign meaning to familiar words. We recorded the looking times of young children learning German aged from 4 to 15 months (infants, N69) and 2 to 4 years (toddlers, N28). Participants saw displays of two pictures (e.g., a car and a baby); one of both objects (the target) was named. The disyllabic name of the target was either correctly stressed on the first syllable (“BA.by”) or it was incorrectly stressed on the second syllable (“ba.BY”). On average, all children looked more at the target when they heard its correctly stressed name (compared to the incorrectly stressed name). Furthermore, the analyses of growth curves for all children showed a steeper increase in looking time at the target picture when children heard the correctly stressed target’s name compared to the incorrectly stressed name. These results thus suggest that even very young German-learning children use syllable stress for incremental word-meaning mapping. However, separate post hoc analyses revealed robust differences in overall target fixations only in toddlers but not in infants. The stronger effects in toddlers compared to infants could be related either to the growing vocabulary or the increasing sensitivity to word stress with increasing age.