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.