Variegation – the presence of more than one supraglottal consonant per word – is a key challenge for children as they increase their expressive vocabulary toward the end of the single-word period. Here we consider the prosodic structures of target words and child forms in English, Finnish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to determine whether children learning these languages respond similarly to the challenge or instead differ in ways related to the phonological structure of the adult language. Based on proportional occurrence of each structure, we find that the word forms of children learning Mandarin and Japanese show more variegation than do those of children learning the European languages, although their target words do not; proportions of reduplication, consonant harmony and single-consonant words also differ by language. We conclude that experience with the structure of the language – and thus representation, as well as immature articulatory skills – shapes children’s responses to variegation.

杂色——每个单词存在多个声门上辅音——对儿童来说是一项关键挑战，因为他们在单个单词时期结束时会增加表达词汇量。在这里，我们考虑英语、芬兰语、法语、日语和普通话的目标词和儿童形式的韵律结构，以确定学习这些语言的儿童是否对挑战做出类似的反应，或者与成人语言的语音结构相关的方式有所不同。根据每种结构出现的比例，我们发现学习普通话和日语的孩子的词形比学习欧洲语言的孩子表现出更多的多样性，尽管他们的目标词没有；重叠、辅音和谐和单辅音词的比例也因语言而异。我们得出的结论是，语言结构的经验——以及表征，以及不成熟的发音技巧——塑造了儿童对多样性的反应。