Anne Cutler †

Publications

Displaying 1 - 46 of 46
  • Cutler, A. (2010). Abstraction-based efficiency in the lexicon. Laboratory Phonology, 1(2), 301-318. doi:10.1515/LABPHON.2010.016.

    Abstract

    Listeners learn from their past experience of listening to spoken words, and use this learning to maximise the efficiency of future word recognition. This paper summarises evidence that the facilitatory effects of drawing on past experience are mediated by abstraction, enabling learning to be generalised across new words and new listening situations. Phoneme category retuning, which allows adaptation to speaker-specific articulatory characteristics, is generalised on the basis of relatively brief experience to words previously unheard from that speaker. Abstract knowledge of prosodic regularities is applied to recognition even of novel words for which these regularities were violated. Prosodic word-boundary regularities drive segmentation of speech into words independently of the membership of the lexical candidate set resulting from the segmentation operation. Each of these different cases illustrates how abstraction from past listening experience has contributed to the efficiency of lexical recognition.
  • Cutler, A., El Aissati, A., Hanulikova, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2010). Effects on speech parsing of vowelless words in the phonology. In Abstracts of Laboratory Phonology 12 (pp. 115-116).
  • Cutler, A., Eisner, F., McQueen, J. M., & Norris, D. (2010). How abstract phonemic categories are necessary for coping with speaker-related variation. In C. Fougeron, B. Kühnert, M. D'Imperio, & N. Vallée (Eds.), Laboratory phonology 10 (pp. 91-111). Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Cutler, A., Mitterer, H., Brouwer, S., & Tuinman, A. (2010). Phonological competition in casual speech. In Proceedings of DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010 (pp. 43-46).
  • Cutler, A., Treiman, R., & Van Ooijen, B. (2010). Strategic deployment of orthographic knowledge in phoneme detection. Language and Speech, 53(3), 307 -320. doi:10.1177/0023830910371445.

    Abstract

    The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realized. Listeners detected the target sounds [b, m, t, f, s, k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b, m, t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f, s, k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when spelling was rendered salient by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled filler words. Within the inconsistent targets [f, s, k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with more usual (foam, seed, cattle) versus less usual (phone, cede, kettle) spellings. Phoneme detection is thus not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects; knowledge of spelling stored in the lexical representations of words does not automatically become available as word candidates are activated. However, salient orthographic manipulations in experimental input can induce such sensitivity. We attribute this to listeners' experience of the value of spelling in everyday situations that encourage phonemic decisions (such as learning new names)
  • Cutler, A., Cooke, M., & Lecumberri, M. L. G. (2010). Preface. Speech Communication, 52, 863. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2010.11.003.

    Abstract

    Adverse listening conditions always make the perception of speech harder, but their deleterious effect is far greater if the speech we are trying to understand is in a non-native language. An imperfect signal can be coped with by recourse to the extensive knowledge one has of a native language, and imperfect knowledge of a non-native language can still support useful communication when speech signals are high-quality. But the combination of imperfect signal and imperfect knowledge leads rapidly to communication breakdown. This phenomenon is undoubtedly well known to every reader of Speech Communication from personal experience. Many readers will also have a professional interest in explaining, or remedying, the problems it produces. The journal’s readership being a decidedly interdisciplinary one, this interest will involve quite varied scientific approaches, including (but not limited to) modelling the interaction of first and second language vocabularies and phonemic repertoires, developing targeted listening training for language learners, and redesigning the acoustics of classrooms and conference halls. In other words, the phenomenon that this special issue deals with is a well-known one, that raises important scientific and practical questions across a range of speech communication disciplines, and Speech Communication is arguably the ideal vehicle for presentation of such a breadth of approaches in a single volume. The call for papers for this issue elicited a large number of submissions from across the full range of the journal’s interdisciplinary scope, requiring the guest editors to apply very strict criteria to the final selection. Perhaps unique in the history of treatments of this topic is the combination represented by the guest editors for this issue: a phonetician whose primary research interest is in second-language speech (MLGL), an engineer whose primary research field is the acoustics of masking in speech processing (MC), and a psychologist whose primary research topic is the recognition of spoken words (AC). In the opening article of the issue, these three authors together review the existing literature on listening to second-language speech under adverse conditions, bringing together these differing perspectives for the first time in a single contribution. The introductory review is followed by 13 new experimental reports of phonetic, acoustic and psychological studies of the topic. The guest editors thank Speech Communication editor Marc Swerts and the journal’s team at Elsevier, as well as all the reviewers who devoted time and expert efforts to perfecting the contributions to this issue.
  • Cutler, A., & Shanley, J. (2010). Validation of a training method for L2 continuous-speech segmentation. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 1844-1847).

    Abstract

    Recognising continuous speech in a second language is often unexpectedly difficult, as the operation of segmenting speech is so attuned to native-language structure. We report the initial steps in development of a novel training method for second-language listening, focusing on speech segmentation and employing a task designed for studying this: word-spotting. Listeners detect real words in sequences consisting of a word plus a minimal context. The present validation study shows that learners from varying non-English backgrounds successfully perform a version of this task in English, and display appropriate sensitivity to structural factors that also affect segmentation by native English listeners.
  • Junge, C., Hagoort, P., Kooijman, V., & Cutler, A. (2010). Brain potentials for word segmentation at seven months predict later language development. In K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, & L. L. Keil (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Volume 1 (pp. 209-220). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Junge, C., Cutler, A., & Hagoort, P. (2010). Ability to segment words from speech as a precursor of later language development: Insights from electrophysiological responses in the infant brain. In M. Burgess, J. Davey, C. Don, & T. McMinn (Eds.), Proceedings of 20th International Congress on Acoustics, ICA 2010. Incorporating Proceedings of the 2010 annual conference of the Australian Acoustical Society (pp. 3727-3732). Australian Acoustical Society, NSW Division.
  • Lecumberri, M. L. G., Cooke, M., & Cutler, A. (Eds.). (2010). Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions [Special Issue]. Speech Communication, 52(11/12).
  • Lecumberri, M. L. G., Cooke, M., & Cutler, A. (2010). Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review. Speech Communication, 52, 864-886. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2010.08.014.

    Abstract

    If listening in adverse conditions is hard, then listening in a foreign language is doubly so: non-native listeners have to cope with both imperfect signals and imperfect knowledge. Comparison of native and non-native listener performance in speech-in-noise tasks helps to clarify the role of prior linguistic experience in speech perception, and, more directly, contributes to an understanding of the problems faced by language learners in everyday listening situations. This article reviews experimental studies on non-native listening in adverse conditions, organised around three principal contributory factors: the task facing listeners, the effect of adverse conditions on speech, and the differences among listener populations. Based on a comprehensive tabulation of key studies, we identify robust findings, research trends and gaps in current knowledge.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2010). Cognitive processes in speech perception. In W. J. Hardcastle, J. Laver, & F. E. Gibbon (Eds.), The handbook of phonetic sciences (2nd ed., pp. 489-520). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Otake, T., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2010). Competition in the perception of spoken Japanese words. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 114-117).

    Abstract

    Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded at the end of nonsense sequences (e.g., kaba 'hippopotamus' in gyachikaba). When the final portion of the preceding context together with the initial portion of the word (e.g., here, the sequence chika) was compatible with many lexical competitors, recognition of the embedded word was more difficult than when such a sequence was compatible with few competitors. This clear effect of competition, established here for preceding context in Japanese, joins similar demonstrations, in other languages and for following contexts, to underline that the functional architecture of the human spoken-word recognition system is a universal one.
  • Tuinman, A., & Cutler, A. (2010). Casual speech processes: L1 knowledge and L2 speech perception. In K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, M. Wrembel, & M. Kul (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, New Sounds 2010, Poznań, Poland, 1-3 May 2010 (pp. 512-517). Poznan: Adama Mickiewicz University.

    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.
  • Cutler, A., & Broersma, M. (2005). Phonetic precision in listening. In W. J. Hardcastle, & J. M. Beck (Eds.), A figure of speech: A Festschrift for John Laver (pp. 63-91). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A., Klein, W., & Levinson, S. C. (2005). The cornerstones of twenty-first century psycholinguistics. In A. Cutler (Ed.), Twenty-first century psycholinguistics: Four cornerstones (pp. 1-20). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A. (2005). The lexical statistics of word recognition problems caused by L2 phonetic confusion. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 413-416).
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Norris, D. (2005). The lexical utility of phoneme-category plasticity. In Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception (PSP2005) (pp. 103-107).
  • Cutler, A. (Ed.). (2005). Twenty-first century psycholinguistics: Four cornerstones. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A., Smits, R., & Cooper, N. (2005). Vowel perception: Effects of non-native language vs. non-native dialect. Speech Communication, 47(1-2), 32-42. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2005.02.001.

    Abstract

    Three groups of listeners identified the vowel in CV and VC syllables produced by an American English talker. The listeners were (a) native speakers of American English, (b) native speakers of Australian English (different dialect), and (c) native speakers of Dutch (different language). The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). The identification performance of native listeners was significantly better than that of listeners with another language but did not significantly differ from the performance of listeners with another dialect. Dialect differences did however affect the type of perceptual confusions which listeners made; in particular, the Australian listeners’ judgements of vowel tenseness were more variable than the American listeners’ judgements, which may be ascribed to cross-dialectal differences in this vocalic feature. Although listening difficulty can result when speech input mismatches the native dialect in terms of the precise cues for and boundaries of phonetic categories, the difficulty is very much less than that which arises when speech input mismatches the native language in terms of the repertoire of phonemic categories available.
  • Cutler, A. (2005). Why is it so hard to understand a second language in noise? Newsletter, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 48, 16-16.
  • Cutler, A. (2005). Lexical stress. In D. B. Pisoni, & R. E. Remez (Eds.), The handbook of speech perception (pp. 264-289). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Cutler, A. (Ed.). (2005). Twenty-first century psycholinguistics: Four cornerstones. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Goudbeek, M., Smits, R., Cutler, A., & Swingley, D. (2005). Acquiring auditory and phonetic categories. In H. Cohen, & C. Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 497-513). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • Kooijman, V., Hagoort, P., & Cutler, A. (2005). Electrophysiological evidence for prelinguistic infants' word recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(1), 109-116. doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.12.009.

    Abstract

    Children begin to talk at about age one. The vocabulary they need to do so must be built on perceptual evidence and, indeed, infants begin to recognize spoken words long before they talk. Most of the utterances infants hear, however, are continuous, without pauses between words, so constructing a vocabulary requires them to decompose continuous speech in order to extract the individual words. Here, we present electrophysiological evidence that 10-month-old infants recognize two-syllable words they have previously heard only in isolation when these words are presented anew in continuous speech. Moreover, they only need roughly the first syllable of the word to begin doing this. Thus, prelinguistic infants command a highly efficient procedure for segmentation and recognition of spoken words in the absence of an existing vocabulary, allowing them to tackle effectively the problem of bootstrapping a lexicon out of the highly variable, continuous speech signals in their environment.
  • Sharp, D. J., Scott, S. K., Cutler, A., & Wise, R. J. S. (2005). Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: The role of the left inferior frontal gyrus. Brain and Language, 92(3), 309-319. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2004.07.002.

    Abstract

    Positron emission tomography was used to investigate two competing hypotheses about the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in word generation. One proposes a domain-specific organization, with neural activation dependent on the type of information being processed, i.e., surface sound structure or semantic. The other proposes a process-specific organization, with activation dependent on processing demands, such as the amount of selection needed to decide between competing lexical alternatives. In a novel word retrieval task, word reconstruction (WR), subjects generated real words from heard non-words by the substitution of either a vowel or consonant. Both types of lexical retrieval, informed by sound structure alone, produced activation within anterior and posterior left IFG regions. Within these regions there was greater activity for consonant WR, which is more difficult and imposes greater processing demands. These results support a process-specific organization of the anterior left IFG.
  • Van Donselaar, W., Koster, M., & Cutler, A. (2005). Exploring the role of lexical stress in lexical recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58A(2), 251-273. doi:10.1080/02724980343000927.

    Abstract

    Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the role of suprasegmental information in the processing of spoken words. All primes consisted of truncated spoken Dutch words. Recognition of visually presented word targets was facilitated by prior auditory presentation of the first two syllables of the same words as primes, but only if they were appropriately stressed (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by okTO-); inappropriate stress, compatible with another word (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by OCto-, the beginning of octopus), produced inhibition. Monosyllabic fragments (e.g., OC-) also produced facilitation when appropriately stressed; if inappropriately stressed, they produced neither facilitation nor inhibition. The bisyllabic fragments that were compatible with only one word produced facilitation to semantically associated words, but inappropriate stress caused no inhibition of associates. The results are explained within a model of spoken-word recognition involving competition between simultaneously activated phonological representations followed by activation of separate conceptual representations for strongly supported lexical candidates; at the level of the phonological representations, activation is modulated by both segmental and suprasegmental information.
  • Warner, N., Smits, R., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2005). Phonological and statistical effects on timing of speech perception: Insights from a database of Dutch diphone perception. Speech Communication, 46(1), 53-72. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2005.01.003.

    Abstract

    We report detailed analyses of a very large database on timing of speech perception collected by Smits et al. (Smits, R., Warner, N., McQueen, J.M., Cutler, A., 2003. Unfolding of phonetic information over time: A database of Dutch diphone perception. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113, 563–574). Eighteen listeners heard all possible diphones of Dutch, gated in portions of varying size and presented without background noise. The present report analyzes listeners’ responses across gates in terms of phonological features (voicing, place, and manner for consonants; height, backness, and length for vowels). The resulting patterns for feature perception differ from patterns reported when speech is presented in noise. The data are also analyzed for effects of stress and of phonological context (neighboring vowel vs. consonant); effects of these factors are observed to be surprisingly limited. Finally, statistical effects, such as overall phoneme frequency and transitional probabilities, along with response biases, are examined; these too exercise only limited effects on response patterns. The results suggest highly accurate speech perception on the basis of acoustic information alone.
  • Warner, N., Kim, J., Davis, C., & Cutler, A. (2005). Use of complex phonological patterns in speech processing: Evidence from Korean. Journal of Linguistics, 41(2), 353-387. doi:10.1017/S0022226705003294.

    Abstract

    Korean has a very complex phonology, with many interacting alternations. In a coronal-/i/ sequence, depending on the type of phonological boundary present, alternations such as palatalization, nasal insertion, nasal assimilation, coda neutralization, and intervocalic voicing can apply. This paper investigates how the phonological patterns of Korean affect processing of morphemes and words. Past research on languages such as English, German, Dutch, and Finnish has shown that listeners exploit syllable structure constraints in processing speech and segmenting it into words. The current study shows that in parsing speech, listeners also use much more complex patterns that relate the surface phonological string to various boundaries.
  • Costa, A., Cutler, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (1998). Effects of phoneme repertoire on phoneme decision. Perception and Psychophysics, 60, 1022-1031.

    Abstract

    In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1998). Assimilation of place in Japanese and Dutch. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: vol. 5 (pp. 1751-1754). Sydney: ICLSP.

    Abstract

    Assimilation of place of articulation across a nasal and a following stop consonant is obligatory in Japanese, but not in Dutch. In four experiments the processing of assimilated forms by speakers of Japanese and Dutch was compared, using a task in which listeners blended pseudo-word pairs such as ranga-serupa. An assimilated blend of this pair would be rampa, an unassimilated blend rangpa. Japanese listeners produced significantly more assimilated than unassimilated forms, both with pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Dutch materials, while Dutch listeners produced significantly more unassimilated than assimilated forms in each materials set. This suggests that Japanese listeners, whose native-language phonology involves obligatory assimilation constraints, represent the assimilated nasals in nasal-stop sequences as unmarked for place of articulation, while Dutch listeners, who are accustomed to hearing unassimilated forms, represent the same nasal segments as marked for place of articulation.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). How listeners find the right words. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Congress on Acoustics: Vol. 2 (pp. 1377-1380). Melville, NY: Acoustical Society of America.

    Abstract

    Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but these are constructed from a tiny handful of phonetic elements. Consequently, words resemble one another, or can be embedded within one another, a coup stick snot with standing. me process of spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves activation of multiple word candidates consistent with the input, and direct competition between activated candidate words. Further, human listeners are sensitive, at an early, prelexical, stage of speeeh processing, to constraints on what could potentially be a word of the language.
  • Cutler, A., Treiman, R., & Van Ooijen, B. (1998). Orthografik inkoncistensy ephekts in foneme detektion? In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2783-2786). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realised. Listeners detected the target sounds [b,m,t,f,s,k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b,m,t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f,s,k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when listeners’ attention was drawn to spelling by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled fillers. Within the inconsistent targets [f,s,k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with majority and minority spellings. We conclude that performance in the phoneme detection task is not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects, but that salient orthographic manipulation can induce such sensitivity.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). The recognition of spoken words with variable representations. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 83-92). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Aix-en-Provence.
  • Kuijpers, C. T., Coolen, R., Houston, D., & Cutler, A. (1998). Using the head-turning technique to explore cross-linguistic performance differences. In C. Rovee-Collier, L. Lipsitt, & H. Hayne (Eds.), Advances in infancy research: Vol. 12 (pp. 205-220). Stamford: Ablex.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Morphology in word recognition. In A. M. Zwicky, & A. Spencer (Eds.), The handbook of morphology (pp. 406-427). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Spotting (different kinds of) words in (different kinds of) context. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2791-2794). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.
  • Cutler, A. (1984). Stress and accent in language production and understanding. In D. Gibbon, & H. Richter (Eds.), Intonation, accent and rhythm: Studies in discourse phonology (pp. 77-90). Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Cutler, A., & Clifton Jr., C. (1984). The use of prosodic information in word recognition. In H. Bouma, & D. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and Performance X: Control of Language Processes (pp. 183-196). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A., & Clifton, Jr., C. (1984). The use of prosodic information in word recognition. In H. Bouma, & D. G. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and performance X: Control of language processes (pp. 183-196). London: Erlbaum.

    Abstract

    In languages with variable stress placement, lexical stress patterns can convey information about word identity. The experiments reported here address the question of whether lexical stress information can be used in word recognition. The results allow the following conclusions: 1. Prior information as to the number of syllables and lexical stress patterns of words and nonwords does not facilitate lexical decision responses (Experiment 1). 2. The strong correspondences between grammatical category membership and stress pattern in bisyllabic English words (strong-weak stress being associated primarily with nouns, weak-strong with verbs) are not exploited in the recognition of isolated words (Experiment 2). 3. When a change in lexical stress also involves a change in vowel quality, i.e., a segmental as well as a suprasegmental alteration, effects on word recognition are greater when no segmental correlates of suprasegmental changes are involved (Experiments 2 and 3). 4. Despite the above finding, when all other factors are controlled, lexical stress information per se can indeed be shown to play a part in word-recognition process (Experiment 3).
  • Scott, D. R., & Cutler, A. (1984). Segmental phonology and the perception of syntactic structure. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23, 450-466. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science//journal/00225371.

    Abstract

    Recent research in speech production has shown that syntactic structure is reflected in segmental phonology--the application of certain phonological rules of English (e.g., palatalization and alveolar flapping) is inhibited across phrase boundaries. We examined whether such segmental effects can be used in speech perception as cues to syntactic structure, and the relation between the use of these segmental features as syntactic markers in production and perception. Speakers of American English (a dialect in which the above segmental effects occur) could indeed use the segmental cues in syntax perception; speakers of British English (in which the effects do not occur) were unable to make use of them, while speakers of British English who were long-term residents of the United States showed intermediate performance.
  • Cutler, A., & Foss, D. (1977). On the role of sentence stress in sentence processing. Language and Speech, 20, 1-10.
  • Cutler, A. (1977). The context-dependence of "intonational meanings". In W. Beach, S. Fox, & S. Philosoph (Eds.), Papers from the Thirteenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 104-115). Chicago, Ill.: CLS.
  • Cutler, A. (1977). The psychological reality of word formation and lexical stress rules. In E. Fischer-Jørgensen, J. Rischel, & N. Thorsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 2 (pp. 79-85). Copenhagen: Institute of Phonetics, University of Copenhagen.
  • Fay, D., & Cutler, A. (1977). Malapropisms and the structure of the mental lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 505-520. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177997.

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