Immediate effects of anticipatory coarticulation in spoken-word recognition

Abstract

Two visual-world experiments examined listeners’ use of pre word-onset anticipatory coarticulation in spoken-word recognition. Experiment 1 established the shortest lag with which information in the speech signal influences eye-movement control, using stimuli such as “The … ladder is the target”. With a neutral token of the definite article preceding the target word, saccades to the referent were not more likely than saccades to an unrelated distractor until 200–240 ms after the onset of the target word. In Experiment 2, utterances contained definite articles which contained natural anticipatory coarticulation pertaining to the onset of the target word (“ The ladder … is the target”). A simple Gaussian classifier was able to predict the initial sound of the upcoming target word from formant information from the first few pitch periods of the article’s vowel. With these stimuli, effects of speech on eye-movement control began about 70 ms earlier than in Experiment 1, suggesting rapid use of anticipatory coarticulation. The results are interpreted as support for “data explanation” approaches to spoken-word recognition. Methodological implications for visual-world studies are also discussed.

Online perception of glottalized coda stops in American English

“…Listeners' fixations converged on the target more quickly when nasalization started early in the vowel than when it started late in the vowel. These results thus show that lexical access follows closely the unfolding of acoustic cues in the speech signal (see also Salverda et al, 2014). Given the visual world paradigm's (Allopenna et al, 1998) success at elucidating listeners' online perception of coarticulatory cues, in this study, we use this paradigm to examine listeners' online perception of coda glottalization in American English.…”

Putting things in new places: Linguistic experience modulates the predictive power of placement verb semantics

“…it takes about 200 ms to plan and initiate an eye movement in a four-object display, Salverda, Kleinschmidt, & Tanenhaus, 2014). The mean duration of this window was 1535 ms. For each trial and each participant, we calculated the total duration of AOI fixations within this time window, and we computed the logit-transformed odds ratio of standing (S + SL) over lying (L + SL) object fixations.…”

A unified account of categorical effects in phonetic perception

“…Fricatives do not follow the given pattern, patterning with vowels on restructuring effects (Harris, 1958;Hughes & Halle, 1956) but exhibiting categorical effects closer to stop consonants. In addition, listeners would not want to discount coarticulatory effects, which have been shown to be used by both infants and adults to help identify upcoming words (Gow, 2001;Salverda et al, 2014;Mahr et al, 2015). Interpreting coarticulation as meaningful would not necessarily predict that stop consonants have more meaningful variance than vowels, as vowels carry large amounts of meaningful information related to speaker identity and dialect.…”