Online Lexical Competition During Spoken Word Recognition and Word Learning in Children and Adults (original) (raw)

As speech input is processed multiple candidate words are automatically activated and compete for selection, a process referred to as lexical competition. Two experiments used pause detection to examine whether incremental lexical competition operates early in speech perception (as the speech string unfolds), as it does in adulthood. In Experiment 1 children and adults were slower to detect pauses inserted in familiar words with late uniqueness points (LUPs), compared with early uniqueness point (EUP) words, for both isolated words and within sentence contexts. Furthermore, faster pause detection latencies were obtained for LUP words presented in constraining compared to neutral sentences but there was no such context effect for EUP words, suggesting that lexical competition is contextually modulated on-line in children and adults. In Experiment 2 children and adults were exposed to novel competitors of existing words with early uniqueness points. We examined whether the onset of lexical competition between novel and existing words could be used as an indicator of across development. In both groups, lexical competition was observed for existing words but only after a period of consolidation. These findings suggest that early, incremental lexical competition effects during spoken word recognition are remarkably similar in children and adults and can be modulated on-line by both sentential context and the introduction of a novel competitor.