Phonological Perception of Early Words / Karen E. Pollock and Richard G. Schwartz.

A study consisting of two experiments attempted to further adapt the visual preference procedure for determining children's meaningful phonological perception. In the first experiment, 1-year-olds were presented with auditory stimuli (words) and screens containing paired color photographs of the object described by each word and of an unusual object for which the child had no label. Six different acoustic forms were created for each word: the citation form; the word with unreleased final consonant; deleted final consonant; deleted initial consonant; vowel replaced with another vowel; and the vowel produced alone. The children's looks to the right or left side of the screen were recorded. In the second experiment, the test was modified to increase the children's overall attention. In both tests, the children looked preferentially at one side of the screen on some of the experimental word forms but not on the control words. They responded preferentially when either one or both consonants were present, and for some words, the correct vowel was critical. In general, the results are consistent with views that children do not perceive words in complete, adult-like forms, but focus only on a few salient features of the adult target. As anticipated, much individual variation was found and research methods to reduce data variability are recommended. (MSE)

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