Relationships Between Vocabulary Size and Spoken Word Recognition in Children Aged 3 to 70

Abstract

Spoken word recognition was investigated in a group of children aged 3:0 to 7:11 (years:months) to assess the relationship between five measures of language development and spoken word recognition accuracy. Two spoken word recognition tasks, gated words and noise- center words, were used. In the gating task, participants were asked to identify words whose final consonants had been removed. In the noise-center task, participants were asked to identify words whose medial vowel had been replaced by broadband noise. In both tasks, participants provided a nonverbal picture-pointing response. Five measures of language development were examined as possible predictors of spoken word recognition accuracy: expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, pre-literacy skills, phonological awareness, and articulation accuracy, each of which was measured using a standardized, norm- referenced test. In the gating task, children required acoustic evidence of the final stop burst in consonant vowel consonant (CVC) words for accurate recognition. In the noise-center task, children required at least 40% of the vowel to be present in CVC words for accurate recognition. Of the five language measures, expressive vocabulary and receptive vocabulary were found to predict a significant proportion of variance in spoken word recognition scores. Results are discussed in terms of factors that influence spoken word recognition accuracy and the relationship between vocabulary size and linguistic development.