This study focused on the impact of stimulus presentation format in the gating paradigm with age. Two presentation formats were employed-the standard, successive format and a duration-blocked one, in which gates from word onset were blocked by duration (i.e., gates for the same word were not temporally adjacent). In Experiment 1, the effect of presentation format on adults' recognition was assessed as a function of response format (written vs. oral). In Experiment 2, the effect of presentation format on kindergarteners', first graders', and adults' recognition was assessed with an oral response format only. Performance was typically poorer for the successive format than for the duration-blocked one. The role of response perseveration and negative feedback in producing this effect is considered, as is the effect of word frequency and cohort size on recognition. Although the successive format yields a conservative picture of recognition, presentation format did not have a markedly different effect across the three age levels studied. Thus, the gating paradigm would seem to be an appropriate one for making developmental comparisons of spoken word recognition.The aim ofthis study was to assess the appropriateness of the gating paradigm for making developmental comparisons of spoken word recognition-that is, to ascertain whether there are characteristics of the paradigm itself that differentially influence children's and adults' performance and thus limit general conclusions about the growth of recognition.In the gating paradigm as it was introduced by Grosjean (1980), listeners are presented with increasing amounts ofacoustic-phonetic input from word onset and asked to identify the target after each gate. This paradigm is consistent with the widespread theoretical view of recognition as a discriminative process (the view that words must be discriminated from various lexical alternatives; see Luce, 1986) and has proved useful in the illumination of key theoretical issues regarding this process in adults (e.g., the extent to which it is sequential, with greater perceptual weighting of word-initial vs. non-initial input; cf. Grosjean, 1985;Salasoo & Pisoni, 1985). Less attention has been paid to recognition in childhood, in part because of a shortage of tasks that are amenable for the study of younger listeners. Without such tasks, we cannot assess theoretical issues regarding This research was supported by the Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama and by NICHHD Grant HD30398. We thank Steve Smith for software development and Paul Luce for computational analysis of stimulus characteristics. James Flege and Linda Smith made helpful comments on this paper, as did Joanne Miller and three anonymous reviewers. Aisha Holmes, Cindy Marshall, and Lauren Randazza assisted in data collection and scoring. We are also grateful to the principal, Jack Allison, the staff, and the students of Hall-Kent Elementary School for their participation. Address correspondence to A. C. Walley, Department of Psychology, Universit...

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In comparison to what is known about speech perception in infancy and adulthood, much less is known about perception in childhood. Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus that phonetic/phonemic segments are not present in the ‘‘initial state,’’ but only emerge gradually over the course of childhood as units of speech representation and/or processing. How perception may become more segmentally based by virtue of vocabulary growth will be considered—as the mental lexicon grows in overall size, as individual lexical items become more familiar, and as particular regions of the lexicon become more ‘‘crowded’’ (i.e., as the acoustic–phonetic similarity among different words increases). The research to be presented includes recent data bearing on children’s perception of native and non-native vowels in word and nonword contexts. Age-related changes in spoken word representation and processing may have important consequences for other developmental achievements, such as the growth of metaphonological knowledge/skills and early reading ability, as well as for success in learning a second language. More generally, the purpose is to help set an agenda for future research that will provide a more complete picture of the developmental trend for speech perception. [Work supported by NIH.]

Monolingual, English-speaking adults and native Chinese (Mandarin) speakers who learned English as a second language heard stimuli from two ‘‘native,’’ synthetic continua, in which the vowels ranged from English /i/ to /i/ in the context /b–b/ or /b–p/. Thus the end points of the first continuum constituted an English word and a nonword (‘‘bib’’ vs *‘‘beeb’’); the reverse held for the second continuum (*‘‘bip’’ vs ‘‘beep’’). These same subjects also heard stimuli from two ‘‘foreign’’ continua, where the vowels ranged from English /i/ to a foreign (non-English) vowel /Y/ in the contexts described above. Thus the end points of the first continuum corresponded to a word and a nonword (‘‘bib’’ vs *‘‘bYb’’); both end points of the second continuum corresponded to nonwords (*‘‘bip’’ vs *‘‘bYp’’). After training on end points, subjects’ identifications of the nine stimuli of a given continuum were examined to assess whether: the Chinese speakers, like native English speakers, exhibit a ‘‘lexical bias’’ effect for English vowels (from the native continua); vowel categories not bounded by another native/English vowel (as in the foreign continua) expand outward or become better defined with increased exposure to English and/or lexical status. [Work supported by NIH.]