Attentional Allocation to Syllables in American English

Finney, Steven A.; Protopapas, Athanassios; Eimas, Peter D.

doi:10.1006/jmla.1996.0046

Cited by 27 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…No such effect was obtained in control conditions in which the expectation was based on the absolute position of the target phonemes. Similar effects of attentional allocation have also been observed in English (Finney, Protopapas, & Eimas, 1996;Pitt, Smith, & Klein, 1998). Another technique relies on illusory combinations of fragments of dichotic stimuli.…”

Section: The Role Of the Syllable In Spoken Word Recognitionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Boundaries versus Onsets in Syllabic Segmentation

Kearns

Frauenfelder

2001

Journal of Memory and Language

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This study investigated the explicit syllabification of CVCV words in French. In a first syllable-reversal experiment, most responses corresponded to the expected canonical CV.CV segmentation, but a small proportion included the intervocalic consonant in both the first and second syllables, a result previously interpreted for English as indicating ambisyllabicity. Two further partial-repetition experiments showed that listeners systematically include the consonant in the onset of the second syllable, but also often include it in the offset of the first syllable. In addition, the assignment of the intervocalic consonant to the first and second syllables was differentially sensitive to the sonority of the consonant and to its spelling. We argue that the findings are inconsistent with the traditionally held boundary conception and instead support the view that distinct processes are involved in locating the onsets and the offsets of syllables. Onset determination is both more reliable and more dominant. Finally, we propose that syllable onsets serve as alignment points for the lexical search process in continuous spoken word recognition.

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Section: The Role Of the Syllable In Spoken Word Recognitionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Boundaries versus Onsets in Syllabic Segmentation

Kearns

Frauenfelder

2001

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Thus Peretz, Lussier, and Béland (1996) found that word stem completion responses by French-speaking subjects were sensitive to the syllable structure of the prompt (given the prompt BA-subjects were more likely to produce a word with an open lirst syllable, given the prompt BALthey were more likely to produce a word with a closed first syllable), but responses by English-speaking subjects showed no such effect. Finney, Protopapas, and Eimas (1996) have further shown that listeners can apparently use syllabic information to cue them to the location of phoneme targets in a phoneme detection task. Their experiment directly replicated the study of Pallier et al ( 1993), who showed such effects in French and Spanish.…”

Section: Syllabic Itifortna//oilmentioning

confidence: 94%

The Possible-Word Constraint in the Segmentation of Continuous Speech

Norris

McQueen

Cutler

et al. 1997

Cognitive Psychology

223

280

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We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which coultl not be a word -for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detect apple, for example, in fapple (where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than in vujfapple (where vuff could be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accu rately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation. © 1997 Academic Press INTRODUCTIONWhen we listen to continuous speech, we apprehend a sequence of discrete words. The effortlessness with which we understand speech might suggest that recognition of spoken words is a rather simple task; but in fact it is a complex process, in which a very variable and largely continuous speech signal has to be mapped onto a lexicon of tens of thousands of words. TheWe thank the Longman Group, U.K. Inc. for allowing us to use a machine-readable version of the Longman Dictionary o f Contemporary English (Procter, 1975 Owned by Academic Press, 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495 Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount o f bonds, mortgages, and other securities None Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books o f the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name o f the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books o f the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that o f a bona fide owner Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders o f a corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the publishing corporation have been included in paragraphs 2 and 3 when the interests o f such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation Total no copies printed average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months 2249, single issue nearest to filing date 2247 Paid circulation (a) to term subscribers by mail, carrier delivery, or by other means average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months 1054, single issue nearest to filing date 1050 (b) Sal...

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“…Even with input in a language in which the syllable effect is robust-that is, in which syllable boundaries are putatively clear-English listeners show such effects neither in the syllable detection task itself (Cutler et al, 1986) nor in word stem completion (Peretz et al, 1996). In the attentional allocation task, phoneme detection attention cannot be allocated to the internal syllable boundary in an initially stressed word (Pallier, 1994;Finney, Protopapas, & Eimas, 1996;Protopapas, Finney, & Eimas, 1995), but it can be allocated to either side of the boundary in a nally stressed word such as submit (Finney et al, 1996;Protopapas et al, 1995); as the boundary in such words is also the initial boundary of a stress unit (foot), this nding is consistent with stress-based rather than syllable-base d segmentation in English. Also consistent with this is Gow and Gordon's (1993) nding that initial stressed syllables were detected more rapidly than initial unstressed syllables.…”

Section: Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Syllable's Role in the Segmentation of Stress Languages

Cutler

1997

Language and Cognitive Processes

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THE "SYLLABLE EFFECT"If French listeners are asked to detect, as rapidly as possible, the phonologica l fragment ba-in a series of spoken words, they respond faster to the word balance than to balcon; conversely, the target bal-is detected more rapidly in balcon than in balance. Syllable boundaries in French are clear: The rst syllable of balance is ba-and the rst syllable of balcon is bal-. Thus listeners consistently respond faster to targets which correspond precisely to the initial syllable of a word. This "syllable effect" discovered by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Segui (1981) has prompted (so far!) a decade and a half of follow-up work (Frauenfelder & Kearns, 1996) .The nding is important because it suggests a mechanism by which listeners can attack the problem of continuity of spoken utterances: Clear cues to where words begin and end are rare, but listeners can only understand utterances by decomposing (i.e. segmenting) them into the individual words of which they are made up. Restricting the possible points at which words might conceivably begin to the set of detected syllable boundaries would simplify this segmentation problem.Syllable effects are extremely robust in experiments with French listeners.

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Attentional Allocation to Syllables in American English

Cited by 27 publications

References 18 publications

Boundaries versus Onsets in Syllabic Segmentation

Boundaries versus Onsets in Syllabic Segmentation

The Possible-Word Constraint in the Segmentation of Continuous Speech

The Syllable's Role in the Segmentation of Stress Languages

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