Lexical perception and segmentation of words beginning with reduced vowels: A role for timing cues

One small step for (a) man: Function word reduction and acoustic ambiguity

“…The present data suggests that durational information is likewise ambiguous between for and for a interpretations, based on a representative sample of comparable tokens from talkers with a similar dialect as Armstrong's. Previous research has shown that in the case of a heavily coarticulated function word, durational and speech rate information in the vicinity of the word can be critical for its successful perception (Banzina & Dilley, 2010;Heffner & Dilley, 2011;Vinke et al, 2009). The ambiguous syntactic, durational and spectral information about the presence of the function word a, combined with the substantial noise in the transmission from the moon to the Earth in the original recording of the lunar communication, probably created a situation in which the typical perceptual fragility of a coarticulated function word would be greatly heightened.…”

“…The rate of context speech syllables also influences whether a coarticulated function word is heard (Dilley & Pitt, 2010;Heffner et al, 2012;Vinke, Dilley, Banzina, & Henry, 2009;Banzina & Dilley, 2010). Moreover, reduced syllables, including function words, are significantly less likely to be heard when they are short relative to their context, but even when such syllables are very short, they can often be made audible if the context speech rate is faster (Vinke et al, 2009;Banzina & Dilley, 2010). Furthermore, syntactic information in the speech context influences the segmentation of continuous speech (Mattys & Melhorn, 2007), including whether a heavily coarticulated function word is perceived as present or absent (Heffner & Dilley, 2011).…”