The Role of Lexical Stress during Spoken-Word Recognition

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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Lexical stress information modulates the time‐course of spoken‐word recognition

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America ◽

10.1121/1.2934181 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 123 (5) ◽

pp. 3425-3425

Author(s):

Eva Reinisch ◽

Alexandra Jesse ◽

James M. McQueen

Keyword(s):

Word Recognition ◽

Time Course ◽

Spoken Word Recognition ◽

Spoken Word ◽

Lexical Stress

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

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1177/1747021819849512 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 72 (11) ◽

pp. 2574-2583 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

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.

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

Language and Speech ◽

10.1177/0023830917736019 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 61 (3) ◽

pp. 430-465 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

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.

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