Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted positive association between CVC word acquisition and neighborhood density, no similar relationship was found for multisyllabic words, despite testing multiple novel neighborhood measures. This finding raises the intriguing possibility that phonological organization of the mental lexicon may play a fundamentally different role in the acquisition of more complex words.

中文翻译：

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儿童音位邻域测量与多音节词习得

多音节词构成了儿童词汇的很大一部分。然而，语音邻域密度与英语多音节单词学习之间的关系却鲜为人知。我们使用基于语料库的方法在 3 岁、4 岁和 6 岁儿童中检查这种联系。虽然我们能够复制广为接受的 CVC 单词获取与邻域密度之间的正相关关系，但尽管测试了多种新的邻域测量方法，但没有发现多音节单词的类似关系。这一发现提出了一个有趣的可能性，即心理词典的语音组织可能在获得更复杂的单词中发挥根本不同的作用。