Do postonset segments define a lexical neighborhood?

Abstract

A number of studies have demonstrated neighborhood effects in spoken word recognition (Goldinger, Luce, & Pisoni, 1989;Luce, Pisoni, & Goldinger, 1990). The neighborhood effect refers to the finding that perception of a word (or a nonsense word) is affected by the number and frequency of occurrence of similar-sounding words in the language. For example, Luce and Pisoni (1998) found that words that are similar to many words in the language (e.g., cat, kit, pat, and cap) are responded to more slowly than words with fewer neighbors, in both lexical decision and naming tasks. Goldinger et al. (1989) demonstrated similar effects in a priming task, and Cluff and found that identification performance for spondees (two-syllable words composed of two monosyllabic words, such as baseball) was influenced by the size of the neighborhood for each syllable. Finally, Vitevitch and Luce (1999) demonstrated neighborhood effects in same-different matching and in semantic categorization (animate vs. inanimate), showing that these effects occur even in tasks that do not focus attention on the sound pattern of the words.Newman, Sawusch, and Luce (1997) demonstrated that neighborhoods also play a role in phonetic perception.Their study was modeled after experiments by Ganong (1980), in which the lexical effect was examined. The lexical effect refers to the finding that perception of an ambiguous phonetic segment is affected by the lexical status of the syllable in which that segment occurs. Ganong presented listeners with pairs of voice onset time (VOT) continua, such that only one endpoint in each continuum constituted a real word in English. For example, one pair of continua included items ranging from the word beef to the nonword peef and from the nonword beace to the word peace. Listeners were more likely to label the ambiguous items in the middle of the two series as a real word. Thus, an item ambiguous between b and p would be labeled as a b in the beef to peef series, but as a p in the beace to peace series. Newman et al. (1997) demonstrated a similar effect of lexical neighborhood. They used pairs of series in which none of the four endpoints were real words but one endpoint of each pair was similar to a greater number of real words in the language. For example, one pair of series included items ranging from gice to kice and gipe to kipe, where gice is similar to more words than is kice and kipe is similar to more words than is gipe. Listeners classified ambiguous items as being whichever endpoint made them similar to more actual words in English.The results in Newman et al. (1997) clearly demonstrate that lexical neighborhoods can influence phoneme perception. However, the precise nature of how the lexicon exerts this influence is still unclear. Most important, it is not entirely clear what constitutes the set of words that influence phoneme perception. Newman et al. (1997) followed the one-phoneme change rule described by Luce (1987), in which all words that differ from the target word by the addition, deletion, or substit...

Cues and cue interactions in segmenting words in fluent speech

“…While these two measures are often correlated, they are separable. Similarity to real words based on both measures seems to influence word recognition (Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998;Magnuson, Dixon, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2007;Newman et al, 2005;Vitevitch, 2002). Consequently, despite the prior work by Vroomen and de Gelder and by Norris et al, we felt that a test of the influence of neighborhood of the stranded syllable on segmentation of a subsequent word was justified.…”

“…Cluff and Luce (1990) showed that the neighborhood of the embedded words that make up spondees (words that consist of two equally-stressed monosyllables, such as baseball) influences listener accuracy in identifying spondees presented against a noise background. Studies have also shown that the perception of nonsense syllables is affected by the number and frequency of occurrence of similar-sounding words in the language (Newman et al, 1997(Newman et al, , 2005. Items that are similar to more real words in the language appear to be treated as if they were themselves more ''word-like''.…”

Word Length and Lexical Competition: Longer is the Same as Shorter

“…It is also important to note that words that overlap in the initial portion of the word (i.e., the "cohort") are not the only items that contribute to lexical competition. Newman, Sawusch, and Luce (2005) found in lexical decision and phoneme identification tasks that words that differed from a target word only in their first phoneme still influenced lexical access. The results of Vitevitch (2002a) further suggest that word onsets may only take on a special status in the recognition of spoken (monosyllabic, English) words when overall neighborhood density is equated.…”

The phonological neighbourhood effect on short-term memory for order

“…According to the former view, cat is a neighbour of pack as well as cap, while according to the latter view; cat is a neighbour of cap but not pack (Goldrick, Folk, & Rapp, 2010). Newman, Sawusch and Luce (2005) examined the possibility that the location of similarities and differences with neighbouring words may have an effect on the level of activation of a word's neighbour, and thus its role as a competitor in speech perception. The proposal arose from predictions made by the cohort model of Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978).…”

“…This proposal had received some early empirical support from studies Chapter Four: Effects of the Lexical Neighbourhood that showed that recognising errors in pronunciation was more successful if the mispronunciation occurred early in the word than when it appeared later in the word (Cole, Jakimik, & Cooper, 1978). Newman et al (2005) examined whether neighbours that mismatch at the onset of the word play the same role as neighbours that match at the onset using a lexical decision task. Non-words were selected that come from one of two groups.…”