Publications

Abstract

Lexically guided perceptual learni ng refers to the use of lexical knowledge to retune sp eech categories and thereby adapt to a novel talker’s pronunciation. This adaptation has been extensively documented, but primarily for segmental-based learning in English and Dutch. In languages with lexical tone, such as Mandarin Chinese, tonal categories can also be retuned in this way, but segmental category retuning had not been studied. We report two experiment s in which Mandarin Chinese listeners were exposed to an ambiguous mixture of [f] and [s] in lexical contexts favoring an interpretation as either [f] or [s]. Listeners were subsequently more likely to identify sounds along a continuum between [f] and [s], and to interpret minimal word pairs, in a manner consistent with this exposure. Thus lexically guided perceptual learning of segmental categories had indeed taken place, consistent with suggestions that such learning may be a universally available adaptation process

Abstract

Children adopted early in life into another linguistic community typically forget their birth language but retain, unaware, relevant linguistic knowledge that may facilitate (re)learning of birth-language patterns. Understanding the nature of this knowledge can shed light on how language is acquired. Here, international adoptees from Korea with Dutch as their current language, and matched Dutch-native controls, provided speech production data on a Korean consonantal distinction unlike any Dutch distinctions, at the outset and end of an intensive perceptual training. The productions, elicited in a repetition task, were identified and rated by Korean listeners. Adoptees' production scores improved significantly more across the training period than control participants' scores, and, for adoptees only, relative production success correlated significantly with the rate of learning in perception (which had, as predicted, also surpassed that of the controls). Of the adoptee group, half had been adopted at 17 months or older (when talking would have begun), while half had been prelinguistic (under six months). The former group, with production experience, showed no advantage over the group without. Thus the adoptees' retained knowledge of Korean transferred from perception to production and appears to be abstract in nature rather than dependent on the amount of experience.

Abstract

Until at least 6 mo of age, infants show good discrimination for familiar phonetic contrasts (i.e., those heard in the environmental language) and contrasts that are unfamiliar. Adult-like discrimination (significantly worse for nonnative than for native contrasts) appears only later, by 9–10 mo. This has been interpreted as indicating that infants have no knowledge of phonology until vocabulary development begins, after 6 mo of age. Recently, however, word recognition has been observed before age 6 mo, apparently decoupling the vocabulary and phonology acquisition processes. Here we show that phonological acquisition is also in progress before 6 mo of age. The evidence comes from retention of birth-language knowledge in international adoptees. In the largest ever such study, we recruited 29 adult Dutch speakers who had been adopted from Korea when young and had no conscious knowledge of Korean language at all. Half were adopted at age 3–5 mo (before native-specific discrimination develops) and half at 17 mo or older (after word learning has begun). In a short intensive training program, we observe that adoptees (compared with 29 matched controls) more rapidly learn tripartite Korean consonant distinctions without counterparts in their later-acquired Dutch, suggesting that the adoptees retained phonological knowledge about the Korean distinction. The advantage is equivalent for the younger-adopted and the older-adopted groups, and both groups not only acquire the tripartite distinction for the trained consonants but also generalize it to untrained consonants. Although infants younger than 6 mo can still discriminate unfamiliar phonetic distinctions, this finding indicates that native-language phonological knowledge is nonetheless being acquired at that age.

Abstract

The perceptual processing of speech is a constant interplay of multiple competing albeit convergent processes: acoustic input vs. higher-level representations, universal mechanisms vs. language-specific, veridical traces of speech experience vs. construction and activation of abstract representations. The present summary concerns the third of these issues. The ability to generalise across experience and to deal with resulting abstractions is the hallmark of human cognition, visible even in early infancy. In speech processing, abstract representations play a necessary role in both production and perception. New sorts of evidence are now informing our understanding of the breadth of this role.

Abstract

In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. However, is this strategy universally available, even in languages with different phonological systems? In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment is also found in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where in principle the use of pitch for lexical identity may take precedence over the use of pitch cues to salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted accent on the target-bearing word. Acoustic analyses revealed greater F0 range in the preceding intonation of the predicted-accent sentences. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the processing of salience.

Abstract

English and German have similar prosody, but their speakers realize some pitch falls (not rises) in subtly different ways. We here test for asymmetry in perception. An ABX discrimination task requiring F0 slope or duration judgements on isolated vowels revealed no cross-language difference in duration or F0 fall discrimination, but discrimination of rises (realized similarly in each language) was less accurate for English than for German listeners. This unexpected finding may reflect greater sensitivity to rising patterns by German listeners, or reduced sensitivity by English listeners as a result of extensive exposure to phrase-final rises (“uptalk”) in their language

Abstract

Background/Aims: Evidence from spoken word recognition suggests that for English listeners, distinguishing full versus reduced vowels is important, but discerning stress differences involving the same full vowel (as in mu- from music or museum) is not. In Dutch, in contrast, the latter distinction is important. This difference arises from the relative frequency of unstressed full vowels in the two vocabularies. The goal of this paper is to determine how this difference in the lexicon influences the perception of stressed versus unstressed vowels. Methods: All possible sequences of two segments (diphones) in Dutch and in English were presented to native listeners in gated fragments. We recorded identification performance over time throughout the speech signal. The data were here analysed specifically for patterns in perception of stressed versus unstressed vowels. Results: The data reveal significantly larger stress effects (whereby unstressed vowels are harder to identify than stressed vowels) in English than in Dutch. Both language-specific and shared patterns appear regarding which vowels show stress effects. Conclusion: We explain the larger stress effect in English as reflecting the processing demands caused by the difference in use of unstressed vowels in the lexicon. The larger stress effect in English is due to relative inexperience with processing unstressed full vowels

Abstract

Spoken-word recognition in a nonnative language is particularly difficult where it depends on discrimination between confusable phonemes. Four experiments here examine whether this difficulty is in part due to phantom competition from “near-words” in speech. Dutch listeners confuse English /aelig/ and /ε/, which could lead to the sequence daf being interpreted as deaf, or lemp being interpreted as lamp. In auditory lexical decision, Dutch listeners indeed accepted such near-words as real English words more often than English listeners did. In cross-modal priming, near-words extracted from word or phrase contexts (daf from DAFfodil, lemp from eviL EMPire) induced activation of corresponding real words (deaf; lamp) for Dutch, but again not for English, listeners. Finally, by the end of untruncated carrier words containing embedded words or near-words (definite; daffodil) no activation of the real embedded forms (deaf in definite) remained for English or Dutch listeners, but activation of embedded near-words (deaf in daffodil) did still remain, for Dutch listeners only. Misinterpretation of the initial vowel here favoured the phantom competitor and disfavoured the carrier (lexically represented as containing a different vowel). Thus, near-words compete for recognition and continue competing for longer than actually embedded words; nonnative listening indeed involves phantom competition.

Abstract

Listeners performed speeded two-alternative choice between two unfamiliar and relatively similar voices or between two phonetically close segments, in VC syllables. For each decision type (segment, voice), the non-target dimension (voice, segment) either was constant, or varied across four alternatives. Responses were always slower when a non-target dimension varied than when it did not, but the effect of phonetic variation on voice identity decision was stronger than that of voice variation on phonetic identity decision. Cues to voice and segment identity in speech are processed inter-dependently, but hard categorization decisions about voices draw on, and are hence sensitive to, segmental information.

Abstract

A visual fixation study tested whether seven-month-olds can discriminate between different talkers. The infants were first habituated to talkers producing sentences in either a familiar or unfamiliar language, then heard test sentences from previously unheard speakers, either in the language used for habituation, or in another language. When the language at test mismatched that in habituation, infants always noticed the change. When language remained constant and only talker altered, however, infants detected the change only if the language was the native tongue. Adult listeners with a different native tongue than the infants did not reproduce the discriminability patterns shown by the infants, and infants detected neither voice nor language changes in reversed speech; both these results argue against explanation of the native-language voice discrimination in terms of acoustic properties of the stimuli. The ability to identify talkers is, like many other perceptual abilities, strongly influenced by early life experience.

Abstract

Every language manifests casual speech processes, and hence every second language too. This study examined how listeners deal with second-language casual speech processes, as a function of the processes in their native language. We compared a match case, where a second-language process t/-reduction) is also operative in native speech, with a mismatch case, where a second-language process (/r/-insertion) is absent from native speech. In each case native and non-native listeners judged stimuli in which a given phoneme (in sentence context) varied along a continuum from absent to present. Second-language listeners in general mimicked native performance in the match case, but deviated significantly from native performance in the mismatch case. Together these results make it clear that the mapping from first to second language is as important in the interpretation of casual speech processes as in other dimensions of speech perception. Unfamiliar casual speech processes are difficult to adapt to in a second language. Casual speech processes that are already familiar from native speech, however, are easy to adapt to; indeed, our results even suggest that it is possible for subtle difference in their occurrence patterns across the two languages to be detected,and to be accommodated to in second-language listening

Abstract

In sequences such as law and order, speakers of British English often insert /r/ between law and and. Acoustic analyses revealed such “intrusive” /r/ to be significantly shorter than canonical /r/. In a 2AFC experiment, native listeners heard British English sentences in which /r/ duration was manipulated across a word boundary [e.g., saw (r)ice], and orthographic and semantic factors were varied. These listeners responded categorically on the basis of acoustic evidence for /r/ alone, reporting ice after short /r/s, rice after long /r/s; orthographic and semantic factors had no effect. Dutch listeners proficient in English who heard the same materials relied less on durational cues than the native listeners, and were affected by both orthography and semantic bias. American English listeners produced intermediate responses to the same materials, being sensitive to duration (less so than native, more so than Dutch listeners), and to orthography (less so than the Dutch), but insensitive to the semantic manipulation. Listeners from language communities without common use of intrusive /r/ may thus interpret intrusive /r/ as canonical /r/, with a language difference increasing this propensity more than a dialect difference. Native listeners, however, efficiently distinguish intrusive from canonical /r/ by exploiting the relevant acoustic variation.

Abstract

Dialects of the same language can differ in the casual speech processes they allow; e.g., British English allows the insertion of [r] at word boundaries in sequences such as saw ice, while American English does not. In two speeded word recognition experiments, American listeners heard such British English sequences; in contrast to non-native listeners, they accurately perceived intended vowel-initial words even with intrusive [r]. Thus despite input mismatches, cross-dialectal word recognition benefits from the full power of native-language processing.

Abstract

It has been claimed that Dutch listeners use suprasegmental cues (duration, spectral tilt) more than English listeners in distinguishing English word stress. We tested whether this asymmetry also holds in production, comparing the realization of English word stress by native English speakers and Dutch speakers. Results confirmed that English speakers centralize unstressed vowels more, while Dutch speakers of English make more use of suprasegmental differences.

Abstract

Sentences with contrastive intonation are assumed to presuppose contextual alternatives to the accented elements. Two cross-modal priming experiments tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives are automatically available to listeners. Contrastive associates – but not non- contrastive associates - were facilitated only when primes were produced in sentences with contrastive intonation, indicating that contrastive intonation makes unmentioned contextual alternatives immediately available. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger a “presupposition resolution mechanism” by which these alternatives become salient.

Abstract

L2 listening can involve the phantom activation of words which are not actually in the input. All spoken-word recognition involves multiple concurrent activation of word candidates, with selection of the correct words achieved by a process of competition between them. L2 listening involves more such activation than L1 listening, and we report two studies illustrating this. First, in a lexical decision study, L2 listeners accepted (but L1 listeners did not accept) spoken non-words such as groof or flide as real English words. Second, a priming study demonstrated that the same spoken non-words made recognition of the real words groove, flight easier for L2 (but not L1) listeners, suggesting that, for the L2 listeners only, these real words had been activated by the spoken non-word input. We propose that further understanding of the activation and competition process in L2 lexical processing could lead to new understanding of L2 listening difficulty.

Abstract

Speech processing by human listeners derives meaning from acoustic input via intermediate steps involving abstract representations of what has been heard. Recent results from several lines of research are here brought together to shed light on the nature and role of these representations. In spoken-word recognition, representations of phonological form and of conceptual content are dissociable. This follows from the independence of patterns of priming for a word's form and its meaning. The nature of the phonological-form representations is determined not only by acoustic-phonetic input but also by other sources of information, including metalinguistic knowledge. This follows from evidence that listeners can store two forms as different without showing any evidence of being able to detect the difference in question when they listen to speech. The lexical representations are in turn separate from prelexical representations, which are also abstract in nature. This follows from evidence that perceptual learning about speaker-specific phoneme realization, induced on the basis of a few words, generalizes across the whole lexicon to inform the recognition of all words containing the same phoneme. The efficiency of human speech processing has its basis in the rapid execution of operations over abstract representations.

Abstract

Listeners heard an ambiguous /f-s/ in nonword contexts where only one of /f/ or /s/ was legal (e.g., frul/*srul or *fnud/snud). In later categorisation of a phonetic continuum from /f/ to /s/, their category boundaries had shifted; hearing -rul led to expanded /f/ categories, -nud expanded /s/. Thus phonotactic sequence information alone induces perceptual retuning of phoneme category boundaries; lexical access is not required.

Abstract

Speech recognition in noise is harder in second (L2) than first languages (L1). This could be because noise disrupts speech processing more in L2 than L1, or because L1 listeners recover better though disruption is equivalent. Two similar prior studies produced discrepant results: Equivalent noise effects for L1 and L2 (Dutch) listeners, versus larger effects for L2 (Spanish) than L1. To explain this, the latter experiment was presented to listeners from the former population. Larger noise effects on consonant identification emerged for L2 (Dutch) than L1 listeners, suggesting that task factors rather than L2 population differences underlie the results discrepancy.

Abstract

The acquisition of novel phonetic categories is hypothesized to be affected by the distributional properties of the input, the relation of the new categories to the native phonology, and the availability of supervision (feedback). These factors were examined in four experiments in which listeners were presented with novel categories based on vowels of Dutch. Distribution was varied such that the categorization depended on the single dimension duration, the single dimension frequency, or both dimensions at once. Listeners were clearly sensitive to the distributional information, but unidimensional contrasts proved easier to learn than multidimensional. The native phonology was varied by comparing Spanish versus American English listeners. Spanish listeners found categorization by frequency easier than categorization by duration, but this was not true of American listeners, whose native vowel system makes more use of duration-based distinctions. Finally, feedback was either available or not; this comparison showed supervised learning to be significantly superior to unsupervised learning.

Abstract

To segment continuous speech into its component words, listeners make use of language rhythm; because rhythm differs across languages, so do the segmentation procedures which listeners use. For each of stress-, syllable-and mora-based rhythmic structure, perceptual experiments have led to the discovery of corresponding segmentation procedures. In the case of mora-based rhythm, similar segmentation has been demonstrated in the otherwise unrelated languages Japanese and Telugu; segmentation based on syllable rhythm, however, has been previously demonstrated only for European languages from the Romance family. We here report two target detection experiments in which Korean listeners, presented with speech in Korean and in French, displayed patterns of segmentation like those previously observed in analogous experiments with French listeners. The Korean listeners' accuracy in detecting word-initial target fragments in either language was significantly higher when the fragments corresponded exactly to a syllable in the input than when the fragments were smaller or larger than a syllable. We conclude that Korean and French listeners can call on similar procedures for segmenting speech, and we further propose that perceptual tests of speech segmentation provide a valuable accompaniment to acoustic analyses for establishing languages' rhythmic class membership.

Abstract

Dutch listeners outperform native listeners in identifying syllable stress in English. This is because lexical stress is more useful in recognition of spoken words of Dutch than of English, so that Dutch listeners pay greater attention to stress in general. We examined Dutch listeners’ use of the acoustic correlates of English stress. Primary- and secondary-stressed syllables differ significantly on acoustic measures, and some differences, in F0 especially, correlate with data of earlier listening experiments. The correlations found in the Dutch responses were not paralleled in data from native listeners. Thus the acoustic cues which distinguish English primary versus secondary stress are better exploited by Dutch than by native listeners.

Abstract

In contrast to initial L1 vocabularies, which of necessity depend largely on heard exemplars, L2 vocabulary construction can draw on a variety of knowledge sources. This can lead to richer stored knowledge about the phonology of the L2 than the listener's prelexical phonetic processing capacity can support, and thus to mismatch between the level of detail required for accurate lexical mapping and the level of detail delivered by the prelexical processor. Experiments on spoken word recognition in L2 have shown that phonetic contrasts which are not reliably perceived are represented in the lexicon nonetheless. This lexical representation of contrast must be based on abstract knowledge, not on veridical representation of heard exemplars. New experiments confirm that provision of abstract knowledge (in the form of spelling) can induce lexical representation of a contrast which is not reliably perceived; but also that experience (in the form of frequency of occurrence) modulates the mismatch of phonetic and lexical processing. We conclude that a correct account of word recognition in L2 (as indeed in L1) requires consideration of both abstract and episodic information.

Abstract

The difficulty of listening to speech in noise is exacerbated when the speech is in the listener’s L2 rather than L1. In this study, Spanish and Dutch users of English as an L2 identified American English consonants in a constant intervocalic context. Their performance was compared with that of L1 (British English) listeners, under quiet conditions and when the speech was masked by speech from another talker or by noise. Masking affected performance more for the Spanish listeners than for the L1 listeners, but not for the Dutch listeners, whose performance was worse than the L1 case to about the same degree in all conditions. There were, however,large differences in the pattern of results across individual consonants, which were consistent with differences in how consonants are identified in the respective L1s.

Abstract

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was previously observed only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report three experiments in which speakers of Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese but similar to it in crucial aspects of rhythmic structure, heard speech in Japanese and in their own language, and Japanese listeners heard Telugu. For the Telugu listeners, detection of target sequences in Japanese speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. The same results appeared when Japanese listeners heard Telugu speech containing only codas permissible in Japanese. Telugu listeners' results with Telugu speech were mixed, but the overall pattern revealed correspondences between the response patterns of the two listener groups, as predicted by the rhythmic similarity hypothesis. Telugu and Japanese listeners appear to command similar procedures for speech segmentation, further bolstering the proposal that aspects of language phonological structure affect listeners' speech segmentation.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that segmentation skills are language-specific, making it difficult to segment continuous speech in an unfamiliar language into its component words. Here we present the first study capturing the delay in segmentation and recognition in the foreign listener using ERPs. We compared the ability of Dutch adults and of English adults without knowledge of Dutch (‘foreign listeners’) to segment familiarized words from continuous Dutch speech. We used the known effect of repetition on the event-related potential (ERP) as an index of recognition of words in continuous speech. Our results show that word repetitions in isolation are recognized with equivalent facility by native and foreign listeners, but word repetitions in continuous speech are not. First, words familiarized in isolation are recognized faster by native than by foreign listeners when they are repeated in continuous speech. Second, when words that have previously been heard only in a continuous-speech context re-occur in continuous speech, the repetition is detected by native listeners, but is not detected by foreign listeners. A preceding speech context facilitates word recognition for native listeners, but delays or even inhibits word recognition for foreign listeners. We propose that the apparent difference in segmentation rate between native and foreign listeners is grounded in the difference in language-specific skills available to the listeners.

Abstract

We investigated whether non-native listeners can exploit phonetic detail in recognizing potentially ambiguous utterances, as native listeners can [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Due to the phenomenon of intrusive /r/, the English phrase extra ice may sound like extra rice. A production study indicates that the intrusive /r/ can be distinguished from the onset /r/ in rice, as it is phonetically weaker. In two cross-modal identity priming studies, however, we found no conclusive evidence that Dutch learners of English are able to make use of this difference. Instead, auditory primes such as extra rice and extra ice with onset and intrusive /r/s activate both types of targets such as ice and rice. This supports the notion of spurious lexical activation in L2 perception.

Abstract

Four experiments examined Dutch listeners’ use of suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition. Isolated syllables excised from minimal stress pairs such as VOORnaam/voorNAAM could be reliably assigned to their source words. In lexical decision, no priming was observed from one member of minimal stress pairs to the other, suggesting that the pairs’ segmental ambiguity was removed by suprasegmental information.Words embedded in nonsense strings were harder to detect if the nonsense string itself formed the beginning of a competing word, but a suprasegmental mismatch to the competing word significantly reduced this inhibition. The same nonsense strings facilitated recognition of the longer words of which they constituted the beginning, butagain the facilitation was significantly reduced by suprasegmental mismatch. Together these results indicate that Dutch listeners effectively exploit suprasegmental cues in recognizing spoken words. Nonetheless, suprasegmental mismatch appears to be somewhat less effective in constraining activation than segmental mismatch.

Abstract

The results of a study on perceptual learning are reported. Dutch subjects made lexical decisions on a list of words and nonwords. Embedded in the list were either [f]- or [s]-final words in which the final fricative had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, midway between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]- final Dutch words like [kara?] (based on karaf, carafe) and unambiguous [s]-final words (e.g., karkas, carcase). A second group heard the reverse (e.g., ambiguous [karka?] and unambiguous karaf). After this training phase, listeners labelled ambiguous fricatives on an [f]- [s] continuum. The subjects who had heard [?] in [f]- final words categorised these fricatives as [f] reliably more often than those who had heard [?] in [s]-final words. These results suggest that speech recognition is dynamic: the system adjusts to the constraints of each particular listening situation. The lexicon can provide this adjustment process with a training signal.

Abstract

We introduce the papers in this special issue by summarising the current major issues in spoken word recognition. We argue that a full understanding of the process of lexical access during speech comprehension will depend on resolving several key representational issues: what is the form of the representations used for lexical access; how is phonological information coded in the mental lexicon; and how is the morphological and semantic information about each word stored? We then discuss a number of distinct access processes: competition between lexical hypotheses; the computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech; whether the lexicon influences prelexical processing through feedback; and the relationship of form-based processing to the processes responsible for deriving an interpretation of a complete utterance. We conclude that further progress may well be made by swapping ideas among the different sub-domains of the discipline.

Abstract

In two word-spotting experiments, Japanese listeners detected Japanese words faster in vowel contexts (e.g., agura, to sit cross-legged, in oagura) than in consonant contexts (e.g., tagura). In the same experiments, however, listeners spotted words in vowel contexts (e.g., saru, monkey, in sarua) no faster than in moraic nasal contexts (e.g., saruN). In a third word-spotting experiment, words like uni, sea urchin, followed contexts consisting of a consonant-consonant-vowel mora (e.g., gya) plus either a moraic nasal (gyaNuni), a vowel (gyaouni) or a consonant (gyabuni). Listeners spotted words as easily in the first as in the second context (where in each case the target words were aligned with mora boundaries), but found it almost impossible to spot words in the third (where there was a single consonant, such as the [b] in gyabuni, between the beginning of the word and the nearest preceding mora boundary). Three control experiments confirmed that these effects reflected the relative ease of segmentation of the words from their contexts.We argue that the listeners showed sensitivity to the viability of sound sequences as possible Japanese words in the way that they parsed the speech into words. Since single consonants are not possible Japanese words, the listeners avoided lexical parses including single consonants and thus had difficulty recognizing words in the consonant contexts. Even though moraic nasals are also impossible words, they were not difficult segmentation contexts because, as with the vowel contexts, the mora boundaries between the contexts and the target words signaled likely word boundaries. Moraic rhythm appears to provide Japanese listeners with important segmentation cues.

Abstract

The central issues in the study of speech recognition by human listeners (HSR) and of automatic speech recognition (ASR) are clearly comparable; nevertheless the research communities that concern themselves with ASR and HSR are largely distinct. This paper compares the research objectives of the two fields, and attempts to draw informative lessons from one to the other.

Abstract

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and any likely location of a word boundary, as cued in the speech signal. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CVC syllable with a schwa, or a CV syllable with a lax vowel. Although neither of these syllable contexts is a possible lexical word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than in a context consisting of a single consonant. Two control lexical-decision experiments showed that the word-spotting results reflected the relative segmentation difficulty of the words in different contexts. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific.

Abstract

Current models of spoken-word recognition assume automatic activation of multiple candidate words fully or partially compatible with the speech input. We propose that listeners make use of this concurrent activation in word play such as punning. Distortion in punning should ideally involve no more than a minimal contrastive deviation between two words, namely a phoneme. Moreover, we propose that this metric of similarity does not presuppose phonemic awareness on the part of the punster. We support these claims with an analysis of modern and traditional puns in Japanese (in which phonemic awareness in language users is not encouraged by alphabetic orthography). For both data sets, the results support the predictions. Punning draws on basic processes of spokenword recognition, common across languages.

Abstract

Four cross-modal priming experiments in Spanish addressed the role of suprasegmental and segmental information in the activation of spoken words. Listeners heard neutral sentences ending with word fragments (e.g., princi-) and made lexical decisions on letter strings presented at fragment offset. Responses were compared for fragment primes that fully matched the spoken form of the initial portion of target words, versus primes that mismatched in a single element (stress pattern; one vowel; one consonant), versus control primes. Fully matching primes always facilitated lexical decision responses, in comparison to the control condition, while mismatching primes always produced inhibition. The respective strength of the contribution of stress, vowel, and consonant (one feature mismatch or more) information did not differ statistically. The results support a model of spoken-word recognition involving automatic activation of word forms and competition between activated words, in which the activation process is sensitive to all acoustic information relevant to the language’s phonology.

Abstract

In this paper, we use articulatory measures to determine whether Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process or a concrete phonetic process depending on articulatory timing. We examine tongue position during /l/ before underlying schwa and epenthetic schwa and in coda position. We find greater tip raising before both types of schwa, indicating light /l/ before schwa and dark /l/ in coda position. We argue that the ability of epenthetic schwa to condition the /l/ alternation shows that Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process involving insertion of some unit, and cannot be accounted for within Articulatory Phonology.

Abstract

Articulatory data are used to address the question of whether Dutch schwa insertion is a phonological or a phonetic process. By investigating tongue tip raising and dorsal lowering, we show that /l/ when it appears before inserted schwa is a light /l/, just as /l/ before an underlying schwa is, and unlike the dark /l/ before a consonant in non-insertion productions of the same words. The fact that inserted schwa can condition the light/dark /l/ alternation shows that schwa insertion involves the phonological insertion of a segment rather than phonetic adjustments to articulations.