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An experimental investigation of adult perception of one-word utterances*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Rachel L. Olney  and
Ellin Kofsky Scholnick
Rachel L. Olney
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
Ellin Kofsky Scholnick
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Abstract

In order to examine the extent to which adult judgments of first words depend on visual and auditory cues, spontaneous utterances were collected for boys and girls of 1; 5, 1; 6 and 1; 10 as well as adults naming the same toys. Vocalizations clearly appropriate to the original visual context were dubbed onto new contexts varying in the number of phonetic features (0-2) by which the first phoneme of the utterance differed from the initial phoneme labelling the visual context. College students' perceptual accuracy declined with degree of mismatch, although the identical speech occurred in each context. The older the speaker, the less perception was affected by visual context. Whereas the meaning of child speech was judged by visual cues, adult meanings were judged mostly by auditory input. Biases in perceiving early speech may prompt reconsideration of current methodology and theory in early language acquisition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , February 1978 , pp. 131 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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Footnotes

[*]

This report is derived from a dissertation submitted by the first author in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. The research was supervised by the second author. Both authors would like to thank the dissertation committee: Professors Nancy Anderson, William O. Dingwall, David L. Horton, Janet W. Johnson and James G. Martin for their advice and Dr Carol B. Mills and Robert Phillips for their assistance in data analyses. The research was supported in part through grants from the Biomedical Science Support Committee and the Computer Science Center to the Center for Language and Cognition at the University of Maryland. Address for Correspondence: Dr Rachel L. Olney, Department of Psychology, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine 04240.

References

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