The current study investigated whether vocabulary relates to phonetic categorization at neural level in early childhood. Electoencephalogram (EEG) responses were collected from 53 Dutch 20-month-old children in a passive oddball paradigm, in which they were presented with two nonwords “giep” [ɣip] and “gip” [ɣɪp] that were contrasted solely by the vowel. In the multiple-speaker condition, both nonwords were produced by twelve different speakers; while, in the single-speaker condition, one single token of each word was used as stimuli. Infant positive mismatch responses (p-MMR) were elicited in both conditions without significant amplitude differences. When the infants were median split based on vocabulary level, the large and small vocabulary groups showed comparable p-MMR amplitudes yet different scalp distribution in both conditions. These results suggest successful phonetic categorization of native similar sounding vowels at 20 months, and a close relationship between speech categorization and vocabulary development.

目前的研究调查了词汇是否与幼儿期神经水平的语音分类有关。脑电图 (EEG) 反应是从 53 名 20 个月大的荷兰儿童中收集的，采用被动的奇怪范式，其中向他们呈现两个非单词“ giep ” [ɣip] 和“ gip ” [ɣɪp]，仅通过元音进行对比。在多说话人条件下，两个非单词都是由十二个不同的说话人产生的；而在单说话者条件下，每个单词的一个标记被用作刺激。在这两种情况下均引发了婴儿阳性错配反应（p-MMR），没有显着的幅度差异。当婴儿根据词汇水平进行中值划分时，大词汇量组和小词汇量组在两种情况下表现出相似的 p-MMR 幅度，但头皮分布不同。这些结果表明，20 个月大时，母语相似元音的语音分类是成功的，并且语音分类和词汇发展之间存在密切关系。