Abstraction and specificity in preschoolers' representations of novel spoken words

Four experiments explored long-term auditory priming for novel words (nonwo rds) in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds more accurately identi fied novel words that had been presented just twice in an initial study pha se than nonwords that had not been presented, showing auditory priming for nonwords. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 revealed that the sound representations u nderlying auditory priming in young children, as in adults, include both ab stract and token-specific information about the sounds of new words. In Exp eriment 2, 3-year-olds showed priming for studied nonsense syllables that c hanged both token and recorded context from study to test, compared to enti rely new test syllables. In Experiment 3, 3-year-olds more accurately ident ified nonsense syllables that were the same tokens in the same context at s tudy and test than syllables that changed token and context from study to t est. In Experiment 4, 3-year-olds more accurately identified the same-token syllables from Experiment 3, even when those syllables were presented in i solation, spliced out of their original contexts. Thus children's rapidly f ormed representations of now spoken words include both components abstract enough to identify the same sound sequence across changers in word token an d changes in phonetic context and components specific to the originally pre sented token. We argue that the powerful perceptual learning mechanism unde rlying auditory word priming has the right properties to play a central rol e in the development of the auditory lexicon. (C) 2001 Academic Press.