Continuous processing in word recognition at 24 months

Speech processing in adults is continuous: as acoustic-phonetic information is heard, listenersʹ interpretation of the speech is updated incrementally. The present studies used a visual fixation technique to examine whether young children also interpret speech continuously. In Experiments 1 and 2, 24-month-old children looked at visual displays while hearing sentences. Sentences each contained a target word labeling one of the two displayed pictures. Childrenʹs latency to fixate the labeled picture was measured. Childrenʹs responses were delayed when the competing distractor pictureʹs label overlapped phonetically with the target at onset (dog-doll), but not when the picturesʹ labels rhymed (ball-doll), showing that children monitored the speech stream incrementally for acoustic-phonetic information specifying the correct picture. In Experiment 3, adultsʹ responses in the same task were found to be very similar to those of the 24-month-olds. This research shows that by 24 months, children can interpret speech continuously.