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Spoken Word Classification 3Abstract Purpose: Preschool children often have difficulties in word classification, despite good speech perception and production. Some researchers suggest they represent words using phonetic features rather than phonemes. We examine whether there is a progression from feature based to phoneme based processing across age groups, and whether responses are consistent across tasks and stimuli. Method:In Study 1, 120 3 to 5 year old children completed three tasks assessing use of phonetic features in classification, with an additional 58 older children completing one of the three tasks. In Study 2, all of the children, together with an additional adult sample, completed a nonword learning task. Results:In all four tasks, children classified words sharing phonemes as similar. In addition, children regarded words as similar if they shared manner of articulation, particularly word-finally. Adults also showed this sensitivity to manner, but across the tasks there was a pattern of increasing use of phonemic information with age.Conclusions: Children tend to classify words as similar if they share phonemes or share manner of articulation word finally. Use of phonemic information becomes more common with age. These findings are in line with the theory that phonological representations become more detailed in the preschool years. Spoken Word Classification 4 Spoken Word Classification 5 Spoken Word Classification in Children and AdultsThere is a body of evidence that children tend to classify words sharing phonetic features as similar (Snowling, Hulme, Smith, and Thomas, 1994). Some researchers argue that this reflects a fundamental difference in phonological representations of young children in comparison to those of adults (Storkel, 2002), while others argue that phonological representations are adult-like from the second year of life (Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Swingley, 2009). This paper investigates whether children's phonological classification responses are consistent across different ages, tasks and stimuli. Predictable changes with age that are consistent across a range of tasks and stimuli would strengthen the argument that phonological representations change in the preschool years. Skills at different ages: Phonological skills in infancy and early childhood Speech Perception and Production in Infancy.There is a clear contrast between the good speech perception abilities shown by infants and the difficulties in sound segmentation and classification shown by three and four year old children. Even 4 month old children appear to perceive phonemes categorically, (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971). However, some studies have suggested that infants do not always process detailed phonetic information when learning new words. For example, 14 month old infants do not seem to detect a mispronunciation of a newly Spoken Word Classification 6 learnt word, while 8 month old infants (who are not yet linking words and objects) do detect the change, apparently showing greater sensitivity than ...