Abstract
In this study, we examined the influence of various sources of constraint on spoken word recognition in a mispronunciation-detection task. Five- and 8-year-olds and adults were presented with words (intact or with word-initial or noninitial errors) from three different age-of-acquisition categories. “Intact” and “mispronounced” responses were collected for isolated words with or without a picture referent (Experiment 1) and for words in constraining or unconstraining sentences (Experiment2). Some evidence for differential attention to word-initial as opposed to non-initial acoustic-phonetic information (and thus the influence of sequential lexical constraints on recognition) was apparent in young children’s and adults’ response criteria and in older children’s and adults’ reaction times. A more marked finding, however, was the variation in subjects’ performance, according to several measures, with age and lexical familiarity (defined according to adults’ subjective age-of-acquisition estimates). Children’s strategies for responding to familiar and unfamiliar words in different contexts are discussed.
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This research was supported by National Sciences and Engineering Research Council Grant A1078 and a grant from the Connaught Fund, University of Toronto. A preliminary presentation of the research reported here was made at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Baltimore, Maryland, April, 1987.
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Walley, A.C., Metsala, J.L. The growth of lexical constraints on spoken word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics 47, 267–280 (1990). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205001
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205001