Anne Cutler †

Publications

Displaying 1 - 63 of 63
  • Bruggeman, L., & Cutler, A. (2019). The dynamics of lexical activation and competition in bilinguals’ first versus second language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1342-1346). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Speech input causes listeners to activate multiple
    candidate words which then compete with one
    another. These include onset competitors, that share a
    beginning (bumper, butter), but also, counterintuitively,
    rhyme competitors, sharing an ending
    (bumper, jumper). In L1, competition is typically
    stronger for onset than for rhyme. In L2, onset
    competition has been attested but rhyme competition
    has heretofore remained largely unexamined. We
    assessed L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) word
    recognition by the same late-bilingual individuals. In
    each language, eye gaze was recorded as listeners
    heard sentences and viewed sets of drawings: three
    unrelated, one depicting an onset or rhyme competitor
    of a word in the input. Activation patterns revealed
    substantial onset competition but no significant
    rhyme competition in either L1 or L2. Rhyme
    competition may thus be a “luxury” feature of
    maximally efficient listening, to be abandoned when
    resources are scarcer, as in listening by late
    bilinguals, in either language.
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, A., & Antoniou, M. (2019). A criterial interlocutor tally for successful talker adaptation? In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1485-1489). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Part of the remarkable efficiency of listening is
    accommodation to unfamiliar talkers’ specific
    pronunciations by retuning of phonemic intercategory
    boundaries. Such retuning occurs in second
    (L2) as well as first language (L1); however, recent
    research with emigrés revealed successful adaptation
    in the environmental L2 but, unprecedentedly, not in
    L1 despite continuing L1 use. A possible explanation
    involving relative exposure to novel talkers is here
    tested in heritage language users with Mandarin as
    family L1 and English as environmental language. In
    English, exposure to an ambiguous sound in
    disambiguating word contexts prompted the expected
    adjustment of phonemic boundaries in subsequent
    categorisation. However, no adjustment occurred in
    Mandarin, again despite regular use. Participants
    reported highly asymmetric interlocutor counts in the
    two languages. We conclude that successful retuning
    ability requires regular exposure to novel talkers in
    the language in question, a criterion not met for the
    emigrés’ or for these heritage users’ L1.
  • Joo, H., Jang, J., Kim, S., Cho, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). Prosodic structural effects on coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Australian English in comparison to American English. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 835-839). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English
    (AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to
    lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N’s nasality and V’s orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary
    induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally.
    But AusE showed some differences in terms
    of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in
    comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect’s phonetic grammar.
  • Nazzi, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). How consonants and vowels shape spoken-language recognition. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 25-47. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011919.

    Abstract

    All languages instantiate a consonant/vowel contrast. This contrast has processing consequences at different levels of spoken-language recognition throughout the lifespan. In adulthood, lexical processing is more strongly associated with consonant than with vowel processing; this has been demonstrated across 13 languages from seven language families and in a variety of auditory lexical-level tasks (deciding whether a spoken input is a word, spotting a real word embedded in a minimal context, reconstructing a word minimally altered into a pseudoword, learning new words or the “words” of a made-up language), as well as in written-word tasks involving phonological processing. In infancy, a consonant advantage in word learning and recognition is found to emerge during development in some languages, though possibly not in others, revealing that the stronger lexicon–consonant association found in adulthood is learned. Current research is evaluating the relative contribution of the early acquisition of the acoustic/phonetic and lexical properties of the native language in the emergence of this association
  • 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., Sebastian-Galles, N., Soler-Vilageliu, O., & Van Ooijen, B. (2000). Constraints of vowels and consonants on lexical selection: Cross-linguistic comparisons. Memory & Cognition, 28, 746-755.

    Abstract

    Languages differ in the constitution of their phonemic repertoire and in the relative distinctiveness of phonemes within the repertoire. In the present study, we asked whether such differences constrain spoken-word recognition, via two word reconstruction experiments, in which listeners turned non-words into real words by changing single sounds. The experiments were carried out in Dutch (which has a relatively balanced vowel-consonant ratio and many similar vowels) and in Spanish (which has many more consonants than vowels and high distinctiveness among the vowels). Both Dutch and Spanish listeners responded significantly faster and more accurately when required to change vowels as opposed to consonants; when allowed to change any phoneme, they more often altered vowels than consonants. Vowel information thus appears to constrain lexical selection less tightly (allow more potential candidates) than does consonant information, independent of language-specific phoneme repertoire and of relative distinctiveness of vowels.
  • Cutler, A., & Van de Weijer, J. (2000). De ontdekking van de eerste woorden. Stem-, Spraak- en Taalpathologie, 9, 245-259.

    Abstract

    Spraak is continu, er zijn geen betrouwbare signalen waardoor de luisteraar weet waar het ene woord eindigt en het volgende begint. Voor volwassen luisteraars is het segmenteren van gesproken taal in afzonderlijke woorden dus niet onproblematisch, maar voor een kind dat nog geen woordenschat bezit, vormt de continuïteit van spraak een nog grotere uitdaging. Desalniettemin produceren de meeste kinderen hun eerste herkenbare woorden rond het begin van het tweede levensjaar. Aan deze vroege spraakproducties gaat een formidabele perceptuele prestatie vooraf. Tijdens het eerste levensjaar - met name gedurende de tweede helft - ontwikkelt de spraakperceptie zich van een algemeen fonetisch discriminatievermogen tot een selectieve gevoeligheid voor de fonologische contrasten die in de moedertaal voorkomen. Recent onderzoek heeft verder aangetoond dat kinderen, lang voordat ze ook maar een enkel woord kunnen zeggen, in staat zijn woorden die kenmerkend zijn voor hun moedertaal te onderscheiden van woorden die dat niet zijn. Bovendien kunnen ze woorden die eerst in isolatie werden aangeboden herkennen in een continue spraakcontext. Het dagelijkse taalaanbod aan een kind van deze leeftijd maakt het in zekere zin niet gemakkelijk, bijvoorbeeld doordat de meeste woorden niet in isolatie voorkomen. Toch wordt het kind ook wel houvast geboden, onder andere doordat het woordgebruik beperkt is.
  • Cutler, A. (2000). How the ear comes to hear. In New Trends in Modern Linguistics [Part of Annual catalogue series] (pp. 6-10). Tokyo, Japan: Maruzen Publishers.
  • Cutler, A. (2000). Hoe het woord het oor verovert. In Voordrachten uitgesproken tijdens de uitreiking van de SPINOZA-premies op 15 februari 2000 (pp. 29-41). The Hague, The Netherlands: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO).
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Zondervan, R. (2000). Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes). Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Cutler, A. (2000). Real words, phantom words and impossible words. In D. Burnham, S. Luksaneeyanawin, C. Davis, & M. Lafourcade (Eds.), Interdisciplinary approaches to language processing: The international conference on human and machine processing of language and speech (pp. 32-42). Bangkok: NECTEC.
  • Cutler, A., & Koster, M. (2000). Stress and lexical activation in Dutch. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 593-596). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.

    Abstract

    Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about the semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET, 'athlete') and a previously presented visual prime word (e.g. SPORT 'sport') when the spoken word was mis-stressed. The adverse effect of mis-stressing confirms the role of stress information in lexical recognition in Dutch. However, although the erroneous stress pattern was always initially compatible with a competing word (e.g. ATlas, 'atlas'), mis-stressed words did not produced high false alarm rates in unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT - atLAS). This suggests that stress information did not completely rule out segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching words, a finding consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). Tracking TRACE’s troubles. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (Eds.), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 63-66). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.

    Abstract

    Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of acoustic-phonetic mismatches in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in its interactive connectivity, not in the presence of interword competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model.
  • Houston, D. M., Jusczyk, P. W., Kuijpers, C., Coolen, R., & Cutler, A. (2000). Cross-language word segmentation by 9-month-olds. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 504-509.

    Abstract

    Dutch-learning and English-learning 9-month-olds were tested, using the Headturn Preference Procedure, for their ability to segment Dutch words with strong/weak stress patterns from fluent Dutch speech. This prosodic pattern is highly typical for words of both languages. The infants were familiarized with pairs of words and then tested on four passages, two that included the familiarized words and two that did not. Both the Dutch- and the English-learning infants gave evidence of segmenting the targets from the passages, to an equivalent degree. Thus, English-learning infants are able to extract words from fluent speech in a language that is phonetically different from English. We discuss the possibility that this cross-language segmentation ability is aided by the similarity of the typical rhythmic structure of Dutch and English words.
  • Johnson, E. K., Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). The development of word recognition: The use of the possible-word constraint by 12-month-olds. In L. Gleitman, & A. Joshi (Eds.), Proceedings of CogSci 2000 (pp. 1034). London: Erlbaum.
  • McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). Positive and negative influences of the lexicon on phonemic decision-making. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 3 (pp. 778-781). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.

    Abstract

    Lexical knowledge influences how human listeners make decisions about speech sounds. Positive lexical effects (faster responses to target sounds in words than in nonwords) are robust across several laboratory tasks, while negative effects (slower responses to targets in more word-like nonwords than in less word-like nonwords) have been found in phonetic decision tasks but not phoneme monitoring tasks. The present experiments tested whether negative lexical effects are therefore a task-specific consequence of the forced choice required in phonetic decision. We compared phoneme monitoring and phonetic decision performance using the same Dutch materials in each task. In both experiments there were positive lexical effects, but no negative lexical effects. We observe that in all studies showing negative lexical effects, the materials were made by cross-splicing, which meant that they contained perceptual evidence supporting the lexically-consistent phonemes. Lexical knowledge seems to influence phonemic decision-making only when there is evidence for the lexically-consistent phoneme in the speech signal.
  • McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). Why Merge really is autonomous and parsimonious. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (Eds.), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 47-50). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.

    Abstract

    We briefly describe the Merge model of phonemic decision-making, and, in the light of general arguments about the possible role of feedback in spoken-word recognition, defend Merge's feedforward structure. Merge not only accounts adequately for the data, without invoking feedback connections, but does so in a parsimonious manner.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2000). Feedback on feedback on feedback: It’s feedforward. (Response to commentators). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 352-370.

    Abstract

    The central thesis of the target article was that feedback is never necessary in spoken word recognition. The commentaries present no new data and no new theoretical arguments which lead us to revise this position. In this response we begin by clarifying some terminological issues which have lead to a number of significant misunderstandings. We provide some new arguments to support our case that the feedforward model Merge is indeed more parsimonious than the interactive alternatives, and that it provides a more convincing account of the data than alternative models. Finally, we extend the arguments to deal with new issues raised by the commentators such as infant speech perception and neural architecture.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2000). Merging information in speech recognition: Feedback is never necessary. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 299-325.

    Abstract

    Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To defend this thesis, we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic decision making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to account for all the available data on phonemic decision making. The modular Race model (Cutler & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by some recent results, however. We therefore present a new modular model of phonemic decision making, the Merge model. In Merge, information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account for the data through a process of competition between lexical hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of language processing and conclude that modular models are particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech recognition.
  • Norris, D., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Butterfield, S., & Kearns, R. K. (2000). Language-universal constraints on the segmentation of English. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (Eds.), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 43-46). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.

    Abstract

    Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] 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 a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific.
  • Norris, D., Cutler, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). The optimal architecture for simulating spoken-word recognition. In C. Davis, T. Van Gelder, & R. Wales (Eds.), Cognitive Science in Australia, 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society. Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of subcategorical mismatch in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in interactive connectivity, not in the presence of inter-word competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model, which has inter-word competition, phonemic representations and continuous optimisation (but no interactive connectivity).
  • Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (2000). A set of Japanese word cohorts rated for relative familiarity. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 3 (pp. 766-769). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.

    Abstract

    A database is presented of relative familiarity ratings for 24 sets of Japanese words, each set comprising words overlapping in the initial portions. These ratings are useful for the generation of material sets for research in the recognition of spoken words.
  • Clifton, Jr., C., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Van Ooijen, B. (1999). The processing of inflected forms. [Commentary on H. Clahsen: Lexical entries and rules of language.]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1018-1019.

    Abstract

    Clashen proposes two distinct processing routes, for regularly and irregularly inflected forms, respectively, and thus is apparently making a psychological claim. We argue his position, which embodies a strictly linguistic perspective, does not constitute a psychological processing model.
  • Cutler, A., & Clifton, Jr., C. (1999). Comprehending spoken language: A blueprint of the listener. In C. M. Brown, & P. Hagoort (Eds.), The neurocognition of language (pp. 123-166). Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Foreword. In Slips of the Ear: Errors in the perception of Casual Conversation (pp. xiii-xv). New York City, NY, USA: Academic Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Prosodische Struktur und Worterkennung bei gesprochener Sprache. In A. D. Friedrici (Ed.), Enzyklopädie der Psychologie: Sprachrezeption (pp. 49-83). Göttingen: Hogrefe.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Prosody and intonation, processing issues. In R. A. Wilson, & F. C. Keil (Eds.), MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences (pp. 682-683). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1999). Sharpening Ockham’s razor (Commentary on W.J.M. Levelt, A. Roelofs & A.S. Meyer: A theory of lexical access in speech production). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 40-41.

    Abstract

    Language production and comprehension are intimately interrelated; and models of production and comprehension should, we argue, be constrained by common architectural guidelines. Levelt et al.'s target article adopts as guiding principle Ockham's razor: the best model of production is the simplest one. We recommend adoption of the same principle in comprehension, with consequent simplification of some well-known types of models.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Spoken-word recognition. In R. A. Wilson, & F. C. Keil (Eds.), MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences (pp. 796-798). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1999). Pitch accent in spoken-word recognition in Japanese. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 105, 1877-1888.

    Abstract

    Three experiments addressed the question of whether pitch-accent information may be exploited in the process of recognizing spoken words in Tokyo Japanese. In a two-choice classification task, listeners judged from which of two words, differing in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted ~e.g., ka from baka HL or gaka LH!; most judgments were correct, and listeners’ decisions were correlated with the fundamental frequency characteristics of the syllables. In a gating experiment, listeners heard initial fragments of words and guessed what the words were; their guesses overwhelmingly had the same initial accent structure as the gated word even when only the beginning CV of the stimulus ~e.g., na- from nagasa HLL or nagashi LHH! was presented. In addition, listeners were more confident in guesses with the same initial accent structure as the stimulus than in guesses with different accent. In a lexical decision experiment, responses to spoken words ~e.g., ame HL! were speeded by previous presentation of the same word ~e.g., ame HL! but not by previous presentation of a word differing only in accent ~e.g., ame LH!. Together these findings provide strong evidence that accentual information constrains the activation and selection of candidates for spoken-word recognition.
  • Cutler, A., Van Ooijen, B., & Norris, D. (1999). Vowels, consonants, and lexical activation. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville, & A. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 3 (pp. 2053-2056). Berkeley: University of California.

    Abstract

    Two lexical decision studies examined the effects of single-phoneme mismatches on lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. One study was carried out in English, and involved spoken primes and visually presented lexical decision targets. The other study was carried out in Dutch, and primes and targets were both presented auditorily. Facilitation was found only for spoken targets preceded immediately by spoken primes; no facilitation occurred when targets were presented visually, or when intervening input occurred between prime and target. The effects of vowel mismatches and consonant mismatches were equivalent.
  • McQueen, J. M., Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (1999). Lexical influence in phonetic decision-making: Evidence from subcategorical mismatches. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1363-1389. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.25.5.1363.

    Abstract

    In 5 experiments, listeners heard words and nonwords, some cross-spliced so that they contained acoustic-phonetic mismatches. Performance was worse on mismatching than on matching items. Words cross-spliced with words and words cross-spliced with nonwords produced parallel results. However, in lexical decision and 1 of 3 phonetic decision experiments, performance on nonwords cross-spliced with words was poorer than on nonwords cross-spliced with nonwords. A gating study confirmed that there were misleading coarticulatory cues in the cross-spliced items; a sixth experiment showed that the earlier results were not due to interitem differences in the strength of these cues. Three models of phonetic decision making (the Race model, the TRACE model, and a postlexical model) did not explain the data. A new bottom-up model is outlined that accounts for the findings in terms of lexical involvement at a dedicated decision-making stage.
  • Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (1999). Perception of suprasegmental structure in a nonnative dialect. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 229-253. doi:10.1006/jpho.1999.0095.

    Abstract

    Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitchaccent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentlessvariety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spokenword recognition. In the "rst experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, di!ering in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns differed from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed significantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect affects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.
  • Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Cutler, A. (1999). The prosody of speech error corrections revisited. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville, & A. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 2 (pp. 1483-1486). Berkely: University of California.

    Abstract

    A corpus of digitized speech errors is used to compare the prosody of correction patterns for word-level vs. sound-level errors. Results for both peak F0 and perceived prosodic markedness confirm that speakers are more likely to mark corrections of word-level errors than corrections of sound-level errors, and that errors ambiguous between word-level and soundlevel (such as boat for moat) show correction patterns like those for sound level errors. This finding increases the plausibility of the claim that word-sound-ambiguous errors arise at the same level of processing as sound errors that do not form words.
  • Van Donselaar, W., Kuijpers, C. T., & Cutler, A. (1999). Facilitatory effects of vowel epenthesis on word processing in Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 59-77. doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2635.

    Abstract

    We report a series of experiments examining the effects on word processing of insertion of an optional epenthetic vowel in word-final consonant clusters in Dutch. Such epenthesis turns film, for instance, into film. In a word-reversal task listeners treated words with and without epenthesis alike, as monosyllables, suggesting that the variant forms both activate the same canonical representation, that of a monosyllabic word without epenthesis. In both lexical decision and word spotting, response times to recognize words were significantly faster when epenthesis was present than when the word was presented in its canonical form without epenthesis. It is argued that addition of the epenthetic vowel makes the liquid consonants constituting the first member of a cluster more perceptible; a final phoneme-detection experiment confirmed that this was the case. These findings show that a transformed variant of a word, although it contacts the lexicon via the representation of the canonical form, can be more easily perceptible than that canonical form.
  • Butterfield, S., & Cutler, A. (1988). Segmentation errors by human listeners: Evidence for a prosodic segmentation strategy. In W. Ainsworth, & J. Holmes (Eds.), Proceedings of SPEECH ’88: Seventh Symposium of the Federation of Acoustic Societies of Europe: Vol. 3 (pp. 827-833). Edinburgh: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1988). Limits on bilingualism [Letters to Nature]. Nature, 340, 229-230. doi:10.1038/340229a0.

    Abstract

    SPEECH, in any language, is continuous; speakers provide few reliable cues to the boundaries of words, phrases, or other meaningful units. To understand speech, listeners must divide the continuous speech stream into portions that correspond to such units. This segmentation process is so basic to human language comprehension that psycholinguists long assumed that all speakers would do it in the same way. In previous research1,2, however, we reported that segmentation routines can be language-specific: speakers of French process spoken words syllable by syllable, but speakers of English do not. French has relatively clear syllable boundaries and syllable-based timing patterns, whereas English has relatively unclear syllable boundaries and stress-based timing; thus syllabic segmentation would work more efficiently in the comprehension of French than in the comprehension of English. Our present study suggests that at this level of language processing, there are limits to bilingualism: a bilingual speaker has one and only one basic language.
  • Cutler, A. (1988). The perfect speech error. In L. Hyman, & C. Li (Eds.), Language, speech and mind: Studies in honor of Victoria A. Fromkin (pp. 209-223). London: Croom Helm.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1988). The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 113-121. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.14.1.113.

    Abstract

    A model of speech segmentation in a stress language is proposed, according to which the occurrence of a strong syllable triggers segmentation of the speech signal, whereas occurrence of a weak syllable does not trigger segmentation. We report experiments in which listeners detected words embedded in nonsense bisyllables more slowly when the bisyllable had two strong syllables than when it had a strong and a weak syllable; mint was detected more slowly in mintayve than in mintesh. According to our proposed model, this result is an effect of segmentation: When the second syllable is strong, it is segmented from the first syllable, and successful detection of the embedded word therefore requires assembly of speech material across a segmentation position. Speech recognition models involving phonemic or syllabic recoding, or based on strictly left-to-right processes, do not predict this result. It is argued that segmentation at strong syllables in continuous speech recognition serves the purpose of detecting the most efficient locations at which to initiate lexical access. (C) 1988 by the American Psychological Association
  • Hawkins, J. A., & Cutler, A. (1988). Psycholinguistic factors in morphological asymmetry. In J. A. Hawkins (Ed.), Explaining language universals (pp. 280-317). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Henderson, L., Coltheart, M., Cutler, A., & Vincent, N. (1988). Preface. Linguistics, 26(4), 519-520. doi:10.1515/ling.1988.26.4.519.
  • Mehta, G., & Cutler, A. (1988). Detection of target phonemes in spontaneous and read speech. Language and Speech, 31, 135-156.

    Abstract

    Although spontaneous speech occurs more frequently in most listeners’ experience than read speech, laboratory studies of human speech recognition typically use carefully controlled materials read from a script. The phonological and prosodic characteristics of spontaneous and read speech differ considerably, however, which suggests that laboratory results may not generalize to the recognition of spontaneous and read speech materials, and their response time to detect word-initial target phonemes was measured. Response were, overall, equally fast in each speech mode. However analysis of effects previously reported in phoneme detection studies revealed significant differences between speech modes. In read speech but not in spontaneous speech, later targets were detected more rapidly than earlier targets, and targets preceded by long words were detected more rapidly than targets preceded by short words. In contrast, in spontaneous speech but not in read speech, targets were detected more rapidly in accented than unaccented words and in strong than in weak syllables. An explanation for this pattern is offered in terms of characteristic prosodic differences between spontaneous and read speech. The results support claim from previous work that listeners pay great attention to prosodic information in the process of recognizing speech.
  • Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (1988). Speech recognition in French and English. MRC News, 39, 30-31.
  • Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (1988). The relative accessibility of phonemes and syllables. Perception and Psychophysics, 43, 541-550. Retrieved from http://www.psychonomic.org/search/view.cgi?id=8530.

    Abstract

    Previous research comparing detection times for syllables and for phonemes has consistently found that syllables are responded to faster than phonemes. This finding poses theoretical problems for strictly hierarchical models of speech recognition, in which smaller units should be able to be identified faster than larger units. However, inspection of the characteristics of previous experiments’stimuli reveals that subjects have been able to respond to syllables on the basis of only a partial analysis of the stimulus. In the present experiment, five groups of subjects listened to identical stimulus material. Phoneme and syllable monitoring under standard conditions was compared with monitoring under conditions in which near matches of target and stimulus occurred on no-response trials. In the latter case, when subjects were forced to analyze each stimulus fully, phonemes were detected faster than syllables.
  • Cutler, A. (1980). Errors of stress and intonation. In V. A. Fromkin (Ed.), Errors in linguistic performance: Slips of the tongue, ear, pen and hand (pp. 67-80). New York: Academic Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1980). La leçon des lapsus. La Recherche, 11(112), 686-692.
  • Cutler, A. (1980). Productivity in word formation. In J. Kreiman, & A. E. Ojeda (Eds.), Papers from the Sixteenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 45-51). Chicago, Ill.: CLS.
  • Cutler, A. (1980). Syllable omission errors and isochrony. In H. W. Dechet, & M. Raupach (Eds.), Temporal variables in speech: studies in honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 183-190). The Hague: Mouton.
  • Cutler, A., & Isard, S. D. (1980). The production of prosody. In B. Butterworth (Ed.), Language production (pp. 245-269). London: Academic Press.
  • Swinney, D. A., Zurif, E. B., & Cutler, A. (1980). Effects of sentential stress and word class upon comprehension in Broca’s aphasics. Brain and Language, 10, 132-144. doi:10.1016/0093-934X(80)90044-9.

    Abstract

    The roles which word class (open/closed) and sentential stress play in the sentence comprehension processes of both agrammatic (Broca's) aphasics and normal listeners were examined with a word monitoring task. Overall, normal listeners responded more quickly to stressed than to unstressed items, but showed no effect of word class. Aphasics also responded more quickly to stressed than to unstressed materials, but, unlike the normals, responded faster to open than to closed class words regardless of their stress. The results are interpreted as support for the theory that Broca's aphasics lack the functional underlying open/closed class word distinction used in word recognition by normal listeners.

Share this page