Influence of Misarticulation on Preschoolers' Word Recognition

Abstract

Previous research has shown that children are sensitive to speech variability in dialect and accent, and can extract information about the speaker. Misarticulated speech is a form of variability that children encounter in social situations with peers. Children are sensitive to the changes found in accented speech, but their perception of misarticulated speech has not been studied. If children do not understand misarticulated speech from their peers, they may experience a decrease in incidental word learning from peers and a reduced quality of social interactions. The purpose of the present study is to investigate if children are sensitive to misarticulations in speech, and if their ability to identify words containing misarticulated speech is affected by the speech sound substitutions being common or uncommon in children's developmental phonology. Twenty preschoolers heard minimal triplets of words that were canonical productions (e.g., leaf), productions with common substitutes (e.g weaf), and productions with uncommon substitutes (e.g. yeaf). A forced-choice paradigm required children to click on either a real picture or a novel, anomalous picture after hearing each token. Children's mouse movements, selections and reaction times were recorded and analyzed to determine if there is a difference in response between canonical productions and those containing substitutions. Children selected more real objects pictures when they heard a canonical production than a misarticulated production. Reaction time and area under the curve were negatively impacted in substitution conditions. Among the misarticulated productions, children selected more real objects when they heard a production containing a common substitute than when they heard an uncommon substitute, but reaction time and area under the curve were not significantly different. These findings suggest that children's word recognition is facilitated by their experience with words, which supports an exemplar model of the lexicon. Children are sensitive to substitution types that they have experience with, but this recognition comes at a cost to processing which may affect their overall understanding of rapid speech.