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Segmentation errors by human listeners: Evidence for a prosodic segmentation strategy.
Authors:
Butterfield, S. & Cutler, A.
Reference:
In Proceedings of SPEECH '88, Seventh Symposium of the Federation of Acoustic Societies of Europe (pp.827-833), Edinburgh.
Year of publication:
1988
CBU number:
2225
Abstract:
Recognition of words in continuous speech is made more difficult by the absence of explicit word boundary markers. Cutler and Norris (1988) have proposed that listeners compensate by adopting a strategy of assuming each strong syllable to be a potential word onset. This paper tests the predictions of the proposed strategy against evidence from spontaneous and experimentally elicited misperceptions of word boundaries. All word boundary misperceptions in a local corpus and all published collections of 'slips of the ear' were analysed. In the experiment, listeners were presented with short unpredictable utterances close to their previously estimated speech reception threshold. Results show that word boundaries are erroneously inserted before strong syllables and deleted before weak syllables significantly more often than they are erroneously inserted before weak syllables and deleted before strong syllables. The pattern does not simply reflect a preference for responding with high frequency words. These results support the proposed strategy of assuming strong syllables to be word-initial in lexical words.
