An experimental investigation of adult perception of one-word utterances.

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn order to examine the extent to which adult judgments of first words depend on visual and auditory cues, spontaneous utterances were collected for boys and girls of 1; 5, 1; 6 and 1; 10 as well as adults naming the same toys. Vocalizations clearly appropriate to the original visual context were dubbed onto new contexts varying in the number of phonetic features (0-2) by which the first phoneme of the utterance differed from the initial phoneme labelling the visual context. College students' perceptual accuracy declined with degree of mismatch, although the identical speech occurred in each context. The older the speaker, the less perception was affected by visual context. Whereas the meaning of child speech was judged by visual cues, adult meanings were judged mostly by auditory input. Biases in perceiving early speech may prompt reconsideration of current methodology and theory in early language acquisition.