in Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society
M. G. Shafto & P. Langley (eds). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
August 1997.
Matt H. Davis, William D. Marslen-Wilson and M. Gareth Gaskell
Earlier research has suggested that left embedded words (e.g. cat in catalog)
present a problem for spoken word recognition since it is potentially unclear
whether there is a word boundary at the offset of cat. Models of spoken
word recognition have incorporated processes of competition so that the
identification of embedded words can be delayed until longer interpretations
have been ruled out. However, evidence from acoustic phonetics has previously
shown that there are differences in acoustic duration between the syllables
of embedded words and the onsets of longer competitors. The research reported
here used gating and cross-modal priming to investigate the recognition
of embedded words. Results indicate that subjects use these acoustic differences
to discriminate between monosyllabic words and the onset of longer words.
We therefore suggest that on-line processes of lexical segmentation and
word recognition are sensitive to acoustic information, such as syllable
duration, that may only be contrastive with reference to prior spoken context.