Phoneme Use and the Perception of Meaning By Children in Hawaii

Fourth grade children (N=47) m Hawaii were individually presented with two stimulus pictures simultaneously with a taped verbal stimulus for 30 trials. If the word on the tape, e.g., leak [i] was similar to their pronunciation of lick [I], they chose the picture illustrating " lick " as the one showing the meaning of the verbal stimulus. A fifteen minute post-discrimination interview was rated for amount of dialect use. Prediction of picture choice from interview ratings supported the hypothesis derived from the motor theory of speech perception that patterns of speech production (encoding) affect how auditory stimuli are perceived (decoded) which, in this population of English speakers, affected the perception of meaning of a standard English auditory stimulus.