Difficulty in Learning Similar-Sounding Words: A Developmental Stage or a General Property of Learning?

Sep 29, 2026

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The study examines whether challenges in learning similar-sounding words stem from early developmental constraints or reflect an inherent property of initial word learning. Adults with particular L1 backgrounds struggled to learn similar-sounding L2 words even when they could discriminate them perceptually. Results attribute the difficulty to memory limitations for highly similar-sounding words and uncertainty about phonetic category boundaries learned concurrently with words. Overall, vocabulary learning in infancy and adulthood shows greater shared mechanisms across the lifespan.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Similar-sounding word learning across development

The study’s focus and rationale

Encoding phonetic detail during word learning

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers . This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2016, Vol. 42, No. 9, 1377–1399 © 2016 American Psychological Association 0278-7393/16/$12.00 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000247](http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000247) Difficulty in Learning Similar-Sounding Words: A Developmental Stage or a General Property of Learning? Bozena Pajak Duolingo Inc., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Sarah C. Creel and Roger Levy University of California, San Diego How are languages learned, and to what extent are learning mechanisms similar in infant native-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) acquisition? In terms of vocabulary acquisition, we know from the infant literature that the ability to discriminate similar-sounding words at a particular age does not guarantee successful word–meaning mapping at that age (Stager & Werker, 1997) . However, it is unclear whether this difficulty arises from developmental limitations of young infants (e.g., poorer working memory) or whether it is an intrinsic part of the initial word learning, L1 and L2 alike. In this study, we show that adults of particular L1 backgrounds—just like young infants—have difficulty learning similar-sounding L2 words that they can nevertheless discriminate perceptually. This suggests that the early stages of word learning, whether L1 or L2, intrinsically involve difficulty in mapping similarsounding words onto referents. We argue that this is due to an interaction between 2 main factors: (a) memory limitations that pose particular challenges for highly similar-sounding words, and (b) uncertainty regarding the language’s phonetic categories, because the categories are being learned concurrently with words. Overall, our results show that vocabulary acquisition in infancy and adulthood shares more similarities than previously thought, thus supporting the existence of common learning mechanisms that operate throughout the life span. Keywords: word learning, spoken word recognition, nonnative speech perception, second language acquisition Humans are able to learn languages throughout their life spans. But how similar are the learning mechanisms for infants acquiring their native language (L1) and adults learning a second language (L2)? Little work has been done to connect these two literatures, reflecting the underlying assumption of a lack of developmental continuity in terms of language learning (see, e.g., White, Yee, Blumstein, & Morgan, 2013, for discussion) . Instead, infants and adults have been assumed to use qualitatively different mecha- This article was published Online First March 10, 2016 . Bozena Pajak, Duolingo Inc., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sarah C. Creel, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Roger Levy, Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego. Supported by the National Institutes of Health (Training Grants T32-DC000041 and T32-DC000035) from the Center for Research in Language at the University of California San Diego and the Center for Language Sciences at University of Rochester, respectively, and research grants from the University of California San Diego Academic Senate and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For their helpful feedback, we thank Eric Bakovic, Klinton Bicknell, the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab at the University of California San Diego, the audience of LSA 86, and four anonymous CogSci 2012 reviewers. Rafi Feliciano, K. Michael Brooks, and Hannah Byers-Straus helped with data collection. We are grateful to Eugene Carsey for permission to use his photographs of mushrooms ([http://www](http://www).[eugenecarsey.com/](eugenecarsey.com/)). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bozena Pajak, Duolingo Inc., 55

FAQs

What is the core question of the research?

Whether difficulty learning similar-sounding words in language acquisition reflects developmental limits of infants or an intrinsic feature of early word learning that also affects adults learning an L2.

What did the researchers find about adults’ learning of similar-sounding L2 words?

Adults from particular L1 backgrounds had difficulty learning similar-sounding L2 words even though they could discriminate those words perceptually.

What mechanisms explain the difficulty in mapping similar-sounding words to referents?

The authors propose that memory limitations for highly similar-sounding words and uncertainty about phonetic categories—learned alongside words—jointly drive the effect.

Sep 29, 2026

Upload by Jake