Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1-2015
Publication Title
Cognition
Abstract
Children learn from their environments and their caregivers. To capitalize on learning opportunities, young children have to recognize familiar words efficiently by integrating contextual cues across word boundaries. Previous research has shown that adults can use phonetic cues from anticipatory coarticulation during word recognition. We asked whether 18-24. month-olds (n= 29) used coarticulatory cues on the word "the" when recognizing the following noun. We performed a looking-while-listening eyetracking experiment to examine word recognition in neutral vs. facilitating coarticulatory conditions. Participants looked to the target image significantly sooner when the determiner contained facilitating coarticulatory cues. These results provide the first evidence that novice word-learners can take advantage of anticipatory sub-phonemic cues during word recognition.
Keywords
Coarticulation, Eye tracking, Language development, Lexical development, Word learning, Word recognition
Volume
142
First Page
345
Last Page
350
DOI
10.1016/j.cognition.2015.05.009
ISSN
00100277
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mahr, Tristan; McMillan, Brianna T.M.; Saffran, Jenny R.; Ellis Weismer, Susan; and Edwards, Jan, "Anticipatory Coarticulation Facilitates Word Recognition in Toddlers" (2015). Psychology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/psy_facpubs/109
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.