Spoken word recognition and lexical representation in very young children

Although children's knowledge of the sound patterns of words has been a foc us of debate for many years, little is known about the lexical representati ons very young children use in word recognition. In particular, researchers have questioned the degree of specificity encoded in early lexical represe ntations, The current study addressed this issue by presenting 18-23-month- olds with object labels that were either correctly pronounced, or mispronou nced. Mispronunciations involved replacement of one segment with a similar segment, as in 'baby-vaby'. Children heard sentences containing these words while viewing two pictures, one of which was the referent of the sentence. Analyses of children's eye movements showed that children recognized the s poken words in both conditions, but that recognition was significantly poor er when words were mispronounced. The effects of mispronunciation on recogn ition were unrelated to age or to spoken vocabulary size. The results sugge st that children's representations of familiar words are phonetically well- specified, and that this specification may not be a consequence of the need to differentiate similar words in production. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.