The contribution of prosody to spoken word recognition

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIMBERLY C. LINDFIELD ◽  
ARTHUR WINGFIELD ◽  
HAROLD GOODGLASS
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Word Duration ◽  
Word Onset ◽  
Word Prosody

The experiment reported here employed a word-onset gating technique to investigate the role of prosody in word recognition. Subjects were asked to identify words based on word onsets alone, word onsets followed by information about the word duration, or word onsets followed by information about full word prosody (i.e., both duration and stress). Results showed that words were correctly recognized with significantly less segmental onset information when word prosody was available to the subjects. Consistent with this finding, prerecognition error responses reflected correct length and prosody with less onset phonology when prosody information was provided in the stimulus than when only length information was provided. The findings of this experiment confirm the importance of word prosody for spoken word recognition.

Effects of Age and Hearing Sensitivity on the Use of Prosodic Information in Spoken Word Recognition

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 915-925 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Wingfield ◽  
Kimberly C. Lindfield ◽  
Harold Goodglass
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Age Difference ◽  
Hearing Sensitivity ◽  
Perceptual Judgments ◽  
Low Pass ◽  
Word Onset ◽  
Word Prosody

It is well known that spoken words can often be recognized from just their onsets and that older adults require a greater word onset duration for recognition than young adults. In this study, young and older adults heard either just word onsets, word onsets followed by white noise indicating the full duration of the target word, or word onsets followed by a low-pass-filtered signal that indicated the number of syllables and syllabic stress (word prosody) in the absence of segmental information. Older adults required longer stimulus durations for word recognition under all conditions, with age differences in hearing sensitivity contributing significantly to this age difference. Within this difference, however, word recognition was facilitated by knowledge of word prosody to the same degree for young and older adults. These findings suggest, first, that listeners can detect and utilize word stress in making perceptual judgments and, second, that this ability remains spared in normal aging.

Re-reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (11) ◽  
pp. 2574-2583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Gregg ◽  
Albrecht W Inhoff ◽  
Cynthia M Connine
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Coarse Grain ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Lexical Activation ◽  
Stimulus Materials

Spoken word recognition models incorporate the temporal unfolding of word information by assuming that positional match constrains lexical activation. Recent findings challenge the linearity constraint. In the visual world paradigm, Toscano, Anderson, and McMurray observed that listeners preferentially viewed a picture of a target word’s anadrome competitor (e.g., competitor bus for target sub) compared with phonologically unrelated distractors (e.g., well) or competitors sharing an overlapping vowel (e.g., sun). Toscano et al. concluded that spoken word recognition relies on coarse grain spectral similarity for mapping spoken input to a lexical representation. Our experiments aimed to replicate the anadrome effect and to test the coarse grain similarity account using competitors without vowel position overlap (e.g., competitor leaf for target flea). The results confirmed the original effect: anadrome competitor fixation curves diverged from unrelated distractors approximately 275 ms after the onset of the target word. In contrast, the no vowel position overlap competitor did not show an increase in fixations compared with the unrelated distractors. The contrasting results for the anadrome and no vowel position overlap items are discussed in terms of theoretical implications of sequential match versus coarse grain similarity accounts of spoken word recognition. We also discuss design issues (repetition of stimulus materials and display parameters) concerning the use of the visual world paradigm in making inferences about online spoken word recognition.

scholarly journals Unstressed Vowel Reduction Across Majorcan Catalan Dialects: Production and Spoken Word Recognition

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Llompart ◽  
Miquel Simonet
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Speech Performance

This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a patterned phonological alternation in two dialects of Catalan spoken on the island of Majorca, Spain. One of these dialects, that of Palma, merges /ɔ/ and /o/ as [o] in unstressed position, and it maintains /u/ as an independent category, [u]. In the dialect of Sóller, a small village, speakers merge unstressed /ɔ/, /o/, and /u/ to [u]. First, a production study asks whether the discrete, rule-based descriptions of the vowel alternations provided in the dialectological literature are able to account adequately for these processes: are mergers complete? Results show that mergers are complete with regards to the main acoustic cue to these vowel contrasts, that is, F1. However, minor differences are maintained for F2 and vowel duration. Second, a lexical decision task using cross-modal priming investigates the strength with which words produced in the phonetic form of the neighboring (versus one’s own) dialect activate the listeners’ lexical representations during spoken word recognition: are words within and across dialects accessed efficiently? The study finds that listeners from one of these dialects, Sóller, process their own and the neighboring forms equally efficiently, while listeners from the other one, Palma, process their own forms more efficiently than those of the neighboring dialect. This study has implications for our understanding of the role of lifelong linguistic experience on speech performance.

Continuous and discontinuous access in spoken word-recognition: The role of derivational prefixes

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 368-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Komisarjevsky Tyler ◽  
William Marslen-Wilson ◽  
James Rentoul ◽  
Peter Hanney
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word

scholarly journals Processing variant forms in spoken word recognition: The role of variant frequency

2008 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. CONNINE ◽  
L. J. RANBOM ◽  
D. J. PATTERSON
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Variant Frequency

scholarly journals Exploring the Role of Lexical stress in Lexical Recognition

2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilma van Donselaar ◽  
Mariëtte Koster ◽  
Anne Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
Auditory Presentation ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Conceptual Representations ◽  
No Inhibition ◽  
Spoken Words

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.

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