Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An ongoing debate concerns whether spoken word recognition happens in an incremental or continuous manner(Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989; McClelland & Elman, 1986). In the current study, participants (31 adults and 49 infantsaged 24-30months) were presented with four images while they heard a sentence like “Look at the cat”. Among the imageswas one object that rhymed with the spoken word, one object that shared its onset and two phonologically unrelated objects.Growth curve analysis of eye-tracking data revealed that adults preferentially fixated onset competitors over unrelated objectssoon after word onset but did not preferentially fixate rhyme competitors. Fixations of the onset competitors were modulatedby the degree to which the onsets of the three remaining competitors were phonologically similar to the spoken word. Infantsshowed no preference for either type of phonologically related competitor. The absence of a rhyme effect contradicts continuoustheories of spoken word recognition.