Biomedical subjects

D Swingley

Publications and source records attributed to D Swingley.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2000

Spoken word recognition and lexical representation in very young children.

Although children's knowledge of the sound patterns of words has been a focus of debate for many years, little is known about the lexical representations very young children use in word recognition. In particular, researchers have questioned the degree of specificity encoded in early lexical representations. The current study addressed this issue by presenting 18-23-month-olds with object labels that were either correctly pronounced, or mispronounced. Mispronunciations involved replacement of one segment with a similar segment, as in 'baby-vaby'. Children heard sentences containing these words while viewing two pictures, one of which was the referent of the sentence. Analyses of children's eye movements showed that children recognized the spoken words in both conditions, but that recognition was significantly poorer when words were mispronounced. The effects of mispronunciation on recognition were unrelated to age or to spoken vocabulary size. The results suggest that children's representations of familiar words are phonetically well-specified, and that this specification may not be a consequence of the need to differentiate similar words in production.

Female↗

PubMed1999

Continuous processing in word recognition at 24 months.

Speech processing in adults in continuous: as acoustic-phonetic information is heard, listeners' interpretation of the speech is updated incrementally. The present studies used a visual fixation technique to examine whether young children also interpret speech continuously. In Experiments 1 and 2, 24-month-old children looked at visual displays while hearing sentences. Sentences each contained a target word labeling one of the two displayed pictures. Children's latency to fixate the labeled picture was measured. Children's responses were delayed when the competing distractor picture's label overlapped phonetically with the target at onset (dog-doll), but not when the pictures' labels rhymed (ball-doll), showing that children monitored the speech stream incrementally for acoustic-phonetic information specifying the correct picture. In Experiment 3, adults' responses in the same task were found to be very similar to those of the 24-month-olds. This research shows that by 24 months, children can interpret speech continuously.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

When half a word is enough: infants can recognize spoken words using partial phonetic information.

Adults process speech incrementally, rapidly identifying spoken words on the basis of initial phonetic information sufficient to distinguish them from alternatives. In this study, infants in the second year also made use of word-initial information to understand fluent speech. The time course of comprehension was examined by tracking infants' eye movements as they looked at pictures in response to familiar spoken words, presented both as whole words in intact form and as partial words in which only the first 300 ms of the word was heard. In Experiment 1, 21-month-old infants (N = 32) recognized partial words as quickly and reliably as they recognized whole words; in Experiment 2, these findings were replicated with 18-month-old infants (N = 32). Combining the data from both experiments, efficiency in spoken word recognition was examined in relation to level of lexical development. Infants with more than 100 words in their productive vocabulary were more accurate in identifying familiar words than were infants with less than 60 words. Grouped by response speed, infants with faster mean reaction times were more accurate in word recognition and also had larger productive vocabularies than infants with slower response latencies. These results show that infants in the second year are capable of incremental speech processing even before entering the vocabulary spurt, and that lexical growth is associated with increased speed and efficiency in understanding spoken language.

Eye Movements↗