Are two-year-olds sensitive to anticipatory coarticulation?

Abstract

Eyetracking studies have shown that adults are highly sensitive to subphonemic detail in speech [e.g., Shatzman and McQueen (2006)]. In some circumstances, adults use subphonemic coarticulatory information to anticipate which word will occur next in the speech stream [McDonough et al. (2009)]. In the current study, we ask whether two-year-old children use anticipatory coarticulation in a similar manner. Sixteen children were presented with pairs of images. In half of the trials, the names of the images presented on the screen had matching phonological onsets (e.g., doggy and ducky) that also matched in syllable length (e.g., monosyllabic or disyllabic). In the remaining trials, the names of the images had mismatching phonological onsets (e.g., cake and strawberry). In addition, a portion of each trial type was identity spliced (e.g., informative anticipatory coarticulation) and a portion was cross-spliced (e.g., misleading anticipatory coarticulation). We predicted that if two-year-olds are sensitive to anticipatory coarticulation, then they should be slowest to recognize named targets when the heard label was cross-spliced and the two objects on the screen had mismatching phonological onsets. However, all children looked to the named targets equally fast regardless of trial condition. Thus, no evidence of sensitivity to anticipatory coarticulation was observed.