Previous preferential listening studies suggest that 11-month-olds’
early word representations are phonologically detailed, such that
minor phonetic variations (i.e., mispronunciations) impair recogni-
tion. However, these studies focused on infants’ sensitivity to mis-
pronunciations (or omissions) of consonants, which have been
proposed to be more important for lexical identity than vowels. Even
though a lexically related consonant advantage has been consistently
found in French from 14 months of age onward, little is known about
its developmental onset. The current study asked whether French-
learning 11-month-olds exhibit a consonant–vowel asymmetry
when recognizing familiar words, which would be reflected in vowel
mispronunciations being more tolerated than consonant mispronun-
ciations. In a baseline experiment (Experiment 1), infants preferred
listening to familiar words over nonwords, confirming that at
11 months of age infants show a familiarity effect rather than a nov-
elty effect. In Experiment 2, which was constructed using the familiar
words of Experiment 1, infants preferred listening to one-feature
vowel mispronunciations over one-feature consonant mispronunci-
ations. Given the familiarity preference established in Experiment
1, this pattern of results suggests that recognition of early familiar
words is more dependent on their consonants than on their vowels.
This adds another piece of evidence that, at least in French, conso-
nants already have a privileged role in lexical processing by
11 months of age, as claimed by Nespor, Peña, and Mehler (2003).