The Role of Vocabulary Development in Children′s Spoken Word Recognition and Segmentation Ability

Abstract

This paper reviews research bearing on the development of spoken word recognition, from studies of speech perception in infancy and early word productions through investigations of word recognition proper and explicit phoneme segmentation ability in middle childhood. In contrast to the assumption of two prominent models of adult recognition (the cohort model of Marslen-Wilson, 1987, and the neighborhood activation model of Luce, 1986b), the bulk of the developmental research indicates that lexical representation and processing are not, at the outset, segmentally based; instead, they are more holistic in nature. Segmental restructuring of lexical representations begins largely with the "vocabulary growth spurt" in late infancy/toddlerhood and associated pressures for more detailed and efficient storage of lexical items. However, this restructuring is a protracted process that extends over the preschool years, because there is still substantial growth during this period in terms of overall vocabulary size and the familiarity of individual lexical items. Such continued vocabulary growth (and thus the dynamic nature of intra- and interlexical representations) dictates that the use of partial, word-initial acoustic-phonetic input does not always constitute a reliable basis for recognition, as it does for the adult. Extant variations in the segmental structure of basic lexical representations and/or the use of such structure for recognition in the preschool period may contribute to individual differences in explicit phoneme segmentation ability, and thus early reading success.