Articulation Quality Is Inversely Related to Redundancy When Children or Adults Have Verbal Control

Abstract

Early research on spoken language established that words extracted from their original sentential contexts were often very hard to understand. Their intelligibility was modulated by the context from which they were taken: Words excised from highly predictive contexts were less intelligible than ones taken from less predictive contexts, suggesting that talkers compensate for weak context by improving articulation. Curiously, the only study to use children as talkers in this paradigm found the reverse pattern—better intelligibility of words from predictive contexts. Experiment 1 of the current study replicated this odd result, and showed that it only occurred when children were reading prepared materials; the “normal” adult-like pattern was found in the children's spontaneous conversation. Experiment 2 demonstrated that adults can be induced to produce the “reverse” pattern, when they are placed in a challenging reading situation. Experiment 3 showed that adults with high verbal skills produce the normal adult-like pattern when reading aloud, whereas adults with only average verbal skills do not. Collectively, the results indicate that the traditional effect of redundancy can be found only when talkers have good control of the production situation. Children as young as ten can in fact compensate for contextual weakness through articulatory enhancement, but only in conversational situations that afford such control.