Phonological contrasts tend to be preserved or enhanced in perceptually salient or prosodically strong contexts (e.g., word-, foot-, syllable-initial position) and are often merged or lost elsewhere (Beckman, 1998;Lombardi, 1999;Steriade, 2001;Smith, 2002). One issue for the continuity hypothesis (Pinker, 1984) is whether children and adults treat these strength relations in the same way. This paper addresses this question by documenting what appears to be a prominence paradox: Fully developed languages preserve certain contrasts in one set of contexts, but children tend to acquire those contrasts first in the complementary set of contexts. This disparity is suggestive of a developmental shift in strength relations. Such a shift does, however, pose a typological challenge for Optimality Theory (e.g., Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004) insofar as the constraints are presumed to be universal and thus the same for children and adults.
Young and elderly adults heard three types of speech materials varying in both length and degree of semantic and syntactic constraints. Time compression was used to vary speech rates systematically to test a speed of processing hypothesis as one explanation of performance deficits associated with normal aging. In addition to segment length effects, the elderly participants showed significantly steeper rates of performance decline with increasing speech rate, with slope constants dependent on the structural constraints of the speech materials. The results are discussed in terms of processing rate hypotheses and context utilization.
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