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

Apparently homophonous sequences contain acoustic information that differentiates their meanings (Gahl, 2008; Quené, 1992). Adults use this information to segment embedded homophones (e.g., ham vs. hamster; Salverda, et al., 2003) in fluent speech. Whether children also do this is unknown, as is whether listeners of any age use such information to disambiguate lexical homophones. In two experiments, 48 English-speaking adults and 48 English-speaking 7- to- 10-year-old children viewed sets of four images and heard sentences containing phonemically identical sequences while their eye movements were continuously tracked. As in previous research, adults showed greater fixation of target meanings when the acoustic properties of an embedded homophone were consistent with the target than when they were consistent with the alternate interpretation. They did not show this difference for lexical homophones. Children's behavior was similar to that of adults, indicating that the use of subphonemic information in homophone processing is consistent over development.