Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: evidence from eye movements.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

The authors examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability, contrasting auditory, phonological, or lexical accounts by asking whether lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation.

Method

Adolescents with a range of language abilities (N = 74, including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step voice onset time (VOT) continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, beak/peak, etc.) while viewing a screen containing pictures of those words and 2 unrelated objects. Participants selected the referent while eye movements to each picture were monitored as a measure of lexical activation. Fixations were exami

SUBMITTER: McMurray B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4126886 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature