Developmental consistency in the use of subphonemic information during real-time sentence processing

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Acoustic Phonetics

Background:

• Homophones present challenges in speech comprehension due to identical sounds but different meanings.
• Adults use acoustic information to segment embedded homophones (e.g., 'ham' in 'hamster').
• It remains unknown if children process these acoustic cues or if listeners disambiguate lexical homophones using them.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether children use acoustic information to process homophones.
• To determine if listeners of any age use acoustic cues to disambiguate lexical homophones.
• To examine developmental consistency in the use of subphonemic information for homophone processing.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted with 48 adults and 48 children (7–10 years old).
• Participants viewed image sets and heard sentences with phonemically identical sequences.
• Eye movements were tracked to measure attention to different meanings.

Main Results:

• Adults fixated target meanings more when acoustic cues matched the target for embedded homophones.
• This effect was not observed for lexical homophones in adults.
• Children's eye movements mirrored adults', showing similar processing of embedded homophones.

Conclusions:

• The use of subphonemic acoustic information for processing embedded homophones is consistent across development.
• Listeners do not appear to use these acoustic cues to disambiguate lexical homophones.
• This suggests a robust developmental trajectory in utilizing fine-grained acoustic details for speech segmentation.