The slow development of real-time processing: Spoken Word Recognition as a crucible for new thinking about language acquisition and disorders
Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: Words are fundamental to language, linking sound, articulation and spelling to meaning and syntax; and lexical deficits are core to communicative disorders. Work in language acquisition commonly asks how lexical knowledge – the sound pattern and meaning of words – is acquired. This is insufficient to account for skilled behavior. Sophisticated real-time processes must decode the sound pattern of words and interpret them appropriately. This paper reviews work that overcome this gap by using sensitive real-time measures of language processing (eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm) along with highly familiar words with school age children. This work reveals that the development of word recognition skills can be characterized by differences in the rate by which decisions unfold in the lexical system (the activation rate) and that this develops extremely slowly – through adolescence. In contrast language disorders can be linked to differences in the ultimate degree to which competing interpretations are suppressed (competition resolution), and this can be mechanistically linked to deficits in inhibition. This has implications for real-world problems such as reading and second language acquisition. It suggests that developing accurate, flexible, and efficient processing is just an important goal of language acquisition, as acquiring language knowledge.
Authors: Bob McMurray, Keith S Apfelbaum, Bruce Tomblin
Institution: University of Iowa
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3165413618