A nonword is a word is a word: Perceptual evidence for neighborhood density effects in preschool-aged children.

Abstract

Work with infants has suggested that children as young as 9 months are sensitive to phonotactic probability [Jusczyk et al. (1994)], yet there is little direct evidence for phonotactic facilitation effects in preschoolers [Munson et al. (2005)]. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that as infants begin to assign meaning to lexical items, low level phonetic processing is essentially discontinued until competition among lexical items necessitates finer grained phonological representations [Werker and Stager (2000), among others]. However, another possible reason is methodological; work with toddlers has almost exclusively focused on production tasks. Adults clearly exhibit phonotactic facilitation effects in production [Vitevitch et al. (2004)], but any processing effects in children could be masked by noisiness in motor command implementation. The present study therefore examines the effects of phonotactic probability/neighborhood density on lexical access in preschoolers using a purely perceptual (“same/different”) task. Whereas adults exhibit a lexical competition effect for words and a phonotactic facilitation effect for nonwords in speech perception [Vitevitch and Luce (1999)], the present results demonstrate a significant lexical competition effect for both words and nonwords, suggesting that the lexical level is indeed the primary mode of processing for young children.