Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

Knowing what a novel word is not: Two-year-olds 'listen through' ambiguous adjectives in fluent speech.

Thorpe K, Fernald A

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. thorpe@psych.stanford.edu

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives preceding familiar target nouns were accented or deaccented. Target word recognition was disrupted only when lexically ambiguous adjectives were accented like nouns. Experiment 2 measured the extent of interference experienced by children when interpreting prenominal words as nouns. In Experiment 3, adults used prosodic cues to identify the form class of adjective/noun homophones in string-identical sentences before the ambiguous words were fully spoken. Results show that children and adults use prosody in conjunction with lexical and distributional cues to 'listen through' prenominal adjectives, avoiding costly misinterpretation.

Published 20 June 2006 in Cognition, 100(3): 389-433.
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