PERCEPTION OF WORD JUNCTURES BY CHILDREN

A comparative study was undertaken to assess the relative magnitude of the effects of linguistic context on the perception of word-juncture boundaries in 30 young school-aged children, 30 older school-aged chil dren, and 30 adults. Minimally contrasted two-word phrases differing i n word-juncture boundaries were embedded in a meaningful sentence cont ext, nonmeaningful sentence context, and in neutral phrase context. Gr oups performed similarly in the neutral phrase context, and two older groups performed better than the young group in the meaningful context . The poorest performances occurred during the nonmeaningful context, with a significant difference among age groups. Heavier reliance upon top-down processing and less developed linguistic and metalinguistic c ompetence may account for the observed differences among groups.