Leading up the lexical garden path: Segmentation and ambiguity in spoken word recognition.

New tests of the distal speech rate effect: examining cross-linguistic generalization

“…This complements prior research showing the effects of speech rate in the identification of a specific phonemes and category boundaries (Miller and Liberman, 1979; Nygaard et al, 1992; Volaitis and Miller, 1992; Sommers et al, 1994). While it has also been shown that temporal information used in phoneme identification can affect speed and accuracy in lexical access, (Davis et al, 2002; Salverda et al, 2003), the present results for Russian, like the previous results for English (Dilley and Pitt, 2010) show that the temporal information from the context speech rate can affect not only the accurate classification of a single phoneme, but the perception of different numbers of phonological units.…”

“…Earlier research had shown that speech rate could affect perception and processing of a specific, fixed numbers of segmental units, either by affecting the perceived identities of those segments or the locations of phoneme boundaries and best exemplars along a continuum (Miller and Liberman, 1979; Volaitis and Miller, 1992; Sommers et al, 1994) or the speed and accuracy of lexical access for a fixed amount of phonological material (Davis et al, 2002; Salverda et al, 2003). The present results, and those of Dilley and Pitt (2010), are also important in illustrating that temporal manipulations to the context that is distal to the locus of perceptual change (non-adjacent phonemes, and in the case of monosyllabic function words, across a word boundary) can produce relatively large effects on listeners' perceptions of words.…”

“…The first category consists of knowledge-based cues (e.g., semantics, syntax, lexical entries), which affect both word segmentation and lexical access (Dahan and Tanenhaus, 2004; Mattys et al, 2005). The second category consists of signal-based cues, including allophonic and coarticulatory information (Davis et al, 2002; Salverda et al, 2003; Mattys et al, 2005), phonotactic regularities (Vitevitch and Luce, 1999), and stress (Cutler and Norris, 1988; Mattys et al, 2005). …”

“…Timing information in speech perception has been of substantial research interest over the years, both because of its role in perception of small, phoneme-sized units (e.g., Summerfield, 1981; Volaitis and Miller, 1992), as well as in perception of larger lexical structures (e.g., Davis et al, 2002; Salverda et al, 2003). Notably, a substantial body of work has shown that temporal information influences phoneme category boundaries and best exemplars in a variety of languages (Fujisaki et al, 1975; Nooteboom and Doodeman, 1980; Summerfield, 1981; Volaitis and Miller, 1992; Miller and Wayland, 1993; Sommers et al, 1994; Traunmüller and Krull, 2003).…”

“…Notably, a substantial body of work has shown that temporal information influences phoneme category boundaries and best exemplars in a variety of languages (Fujisaki et al, 1975; Nooteboom and Doodeman, 1980; Summerfield, 1981; Volaitis and Miller, 1992; Miller and Wayland, 1993; Sommers et al, 1994; Traunmüller and Krull, 2003). In addition, more recent work suggests that timing cues also influence lexical access for larger linguistic units (Davis et al, 2002; Salverda et al, 2003; Christophe et al, 2004; Niebuhr and Kohler, 2011; Reinisch et al, 2011). For example, Salverda et al (2003) found that when listeners heard the syllable ham , which could be either the monosyllabic word “ham” or the first syllable of the word “hamster,” they were less likely to consider “hamster” as a lexical candidate when durational information matched the monosyllabic parse, “ham.”…”