Online Lexical Competition During Spoken Word Recognition and Word Learning in Children and Adults

Abstract

As speech input is processed multiple candidate words are automatically activated and compete for selection, a process referred to as lexical competition. Two experiments used pause detection to examine whether incremental lexical competition operates early in speech perception (as the speech string unfolds), as it does in adulthood. In Experiment 1 children and adults were slower to detect pauses inserted in familiar words with late uniqueness points (LUPs), compared with early uniqueness point (EUP) words, for both isolated words and within sentence contexts. Furthermore, faster pause detection latencies were obtained for LUP words presented in constraining compared to neutral sentences but there was no such context effect for EUP words, suggesting that lexical competition is contextually modulated on-line in children and adults. In Experiment 2 children and adults were exposed to novel competitors of existing words with early uniqueness points. We examined whether the onset of lexical competition between novel and existing words could be used as an indicator of across development. In both groups, lexical competition was observed for existing words but only after a period of consolidation. These findings suggest that early, incremental lexical competition effects during spoken word recognition are remarkably similar in children and adults and can be modulated on-line by both sentential context and the introduction of a novel competitor.

Learning new vocabulary during childhood: Effects of semantic training on lexical consolidation and integration

“…We acknowledge that the use of fictitious nonwords (e.g., biscal) is advantageous in many respects: They enable tight control over linguistic variables (e.g., phonotactic probability, frequency, length), ensure that stimuli are truly novel to participants, and they are typically designed to be phonotactically indistinguishable from real words. However, it is questionable whether participants treat these nonwords as relevant only in the context of the experiment (Potts, St John & Kirson, 1989), particularly when they are not given a meaning Dumay & Gaskell, 2007;Gaskell & Dumay, 2003;Henderson et al, 2013;Tamminen et al, 2010). Therefore, the present study provides an important opportunity to assess key hypotheses of the CLS account of vocabulary acquisition using real words that are likely to be learned in the classroom.…”

“…Gaskell and colleagues have examined how lexical activity changes when adults (Dumay & Gaskell, 2007;Gaskell & Dumay, 2003) and school-aged children Henderson et al, 2013) learn fictitious novel nonwords (e.g., biscal).…”

“…We examine whether semantic knowledge shapes the time course with which new lexical information is strengthened such that it can be explicitly retrieved and integrated with existing lexical information (as indexed by the emergence of lexical competition). Previous studies have largely used purely phonological training regimes without providing participants with information pertaining to word meaning Dumay & Gaskell, 2007;Gaskell & Dumay, 2003;Henderson et al, 2013). It could be argued that the typical finding of a delay in lexical integration of the novel words is an artefact of the impoverished context in which the words have been learned.…”

“…Previous studies have used repeated tests to measure changes in explicit memory and lexical competition for novel words Dumay & Gaskell, 2007;Gaskell & Dumay, 2003;Henderson et al, 2013).…”

“…However, an alternative view is that vocabulary learning in childhood is partial and incremental (e.g., Dockrell, Braisby & Best, 2007;Nagy & Scott, 2000). Recent developmental studies suggest that a prolonged period of time is needed for a novel nonword (e.g., biscal) to become integrated with the existing lexicon Henderson, Weighall, Brown & Gaskell, 2013) with sleep playing an important role in the -line consolidation (stabilisation and integration) of new phonological forms . These results have been explained within the…”