PHONOLOGICAL PERCEPTION OF EARLY WORDS IN YOUNG CHILDREN USING A VISUAL SEARCH PARADIGM
Abstract
Recent theories of child phonology have suggested that young children form representations of words on the basis of information they extract from the ambient language. Such representations may be based upon misperceptions or perceptual encoding rules. Despite these proposals, there are no experimental data concerning phonological perception at the time children are producing single words (roughly 12 to 24 months of age). This appears to be related to the lack of a valid paradigm for testing meaningful perception in this age group. In the present investigation, a visual search paradigm (adapted from infant paradigms for assessing bimodal perception) was used to test children's recognition of several acoustically distorted variations of familiar words. Twelve normally developing children between 15 and 20 months of age were selected as subjects and participated in six sessions (160 trials total) of the visual search paradigm. Two visual stimuli (photographic slides) were presented side-by-side and one auditory stimulus (recorded natural speech, digitally edited) was presented from a central location. For each trial, the visual stimuli consisted of one slide representing a stimulus word (i.e., a dog, book, or cup) paired with one slide representing an unfamiliar nonsense toy (e.g., a latch or a bicycle grip). Auditory stimuli consisted of one of the stimulus words in one of six acoustic forms (e.g., final consonant deleted, vowel changed). If a form was recognizable, the child was expected to look at the slide representing that word. If a form was unrecognizable, the child was expected to look at the slide of the unfamiliar referent, or to look randomly. Observers scored the duration of looking and the number of looks to each slide. Results indicated that children looked to the matching stimulus more often on some acoustic forms (e.g., final consonant deleted or vowel changed) than on others (e.g., vowel only). Citation forms did not elicit the highest scores. These results support the view that children recognize and store words on the basis of a few salient acoustic features.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Speech therapy
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