Three- and four-year-olds’ perceptual confusions for spoken words

Abstract

Although infants have the ability to discriminate a variety of speech contrasts, young children cannot always use this ability in the service of spoken-word recognition. The research reported here asked whether the reason young children sometimes fail to discriminate minimal word pairs is that they are less efficient at word recognition than adults, or whether it is that they employ different lexical representations. In particular, the research evaluated the proposal that young children's lexical representations are more "holistic" than those of adults, and are based on overall acoustic-phonetic properties, as opposed to phonetic segments. Three-and four-year-olds were exposed initially to an invariant target word and were subsequently asked to determine whether a series of auditory stimuli matched or did not match the target. The critical test stimuli were nonwords that varied in their degree of phonetic featural overlap with the target, as well as in terms of the position(s) within the stimuli at which they differed from the target, and whether they differed from the target on one or two segments. Data from four experiments demonstrated that the frequency with which children mistook a nonword stimulus for the target was influenced by extent of featural overlap, but not by word position. The data also showed that, contrary to the predictions of the holistic hypothesis, stimuli differing from the target by two features on a single segment were confused with the target more often than were stimuli differing by a single feature on each of two segments. This finding suggests that children use both phonetic features and segments in accessing their mental lexicons, and that they are therefore much more similar to adults than is suggested by the holistic hypothesis. 475Since the pioneering work of Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, and Vigorito (1971), it has been demonstrated that infants as young as two months of age have sufficient perceptual abilities to distinguish a variety of speech contrasts (see Aslin, Pisoni, & Jusczyk, 1983;Best, McRoberts, & Sithole, 1988;Eimas, Miller, & Jusczyk, 1987;Jusczyk, 1985;Kuhl, 1987;Werker, 1991). In contrast, studies with young children suggest that they cannot always apply these perceptual abilities directly to the problem of spoken-word recognition (Barton, 1976a(Barton, , 1976b(Barton, , 1980Edwards, 1974;Eilers & Oller, 1976;Garnica, 1971;Graham & House, 1971; Shvachkin, 1948 Shvachkin, / 1973. In one study, Eilers and Oller (1976) taught 22-to 26-month-olds to refer to a toy with a nonsense word (tig) that created a minimal pair with a familiar word (pig).

Young children’s sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon

“…Evidence is emerging from studies of childrenÕs speech perception abilities, their speech production abilities, and their patterns of lexical development showing that children are indeed sensitive to the fine-grained acoustic-phonetic detail that is characteristic of the adult lexicon. Gerken, Murphy, and Aslin (1995) found that 3-and 4-year-olds confused a real word target with a nonword that differed by two features in a single position more often than they did with a nonword that differed by two features in different word positions. If children were perceiving holistically, these two conditions should have been the same.…”

Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech

“…Thus, children may have been more susceptible to disruption by anomalous articles on familiar-word trials in Experiment 2 because of the higher level of unpredictability and the reduction in cue validity across the stimulus set. Other research has also shown that children's performance on the same stimuli varies as a function of the composition of the overall stimulus set (Gerken, Murphy, & Aslin, 1995;Swingley & Aslin, 2007).…”

Word processing at 19 months and its relation to language performance at 30 months: A retrospective analysis of data from German learning children

“…There is evidence that children start with rather unspecific phonological and semantic representations (e.g., Ferguson & Farwell, 1975;Walley, 1993). This may give rise to overgeneralizations of words to concepts they do not refer to in the target language (Clark, 1973) and to confusions of phonologically similar forms in word recognition (e.g., Barton, 1980;Eilers & Oller, 1976;Gerken, Murphy & Aslin, 1995;Metsala, 1997;Walley, 1988).…”