MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitCBSU bibliography search
To request a reprint of a CBSU publication, please
click here to send us an email (reprints may not be available for all publications)
Lexical access in continuous speech: Language specific realisations of a universal model.
Authors:
Cutler, A., Norris, D. & McQueen, J.
Reference:
In T. Otake & A. Cutler (Eds) Phonological Structure and Language Processing Cross-linguistic Studies (pp.227-242). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Year of publication:
1996
CBU number:
3343
Abstract:
The recognition of speech involves the segmentation of continuous utterances into their component words. Cross-linguistic evidence is briefly reviewed which suggests that although there are language-specific solutions to this segmentation problem, they have one thing in common: they are all based on language rhythm. In English, segmentation is stress-based: strong syllables are postulated to be the onsets of words. Segmentation, however, can also be achieved by a process of competition between activated lexical hypotheses, as in the Shortlist model. A series of experiments is summarised showing that segmentation of continuous speech depends on both lexical competition and a metrically-guided procedure. In the final section, the implementation of metrical segmentation in the Shortlist model is described: the activation of lexical hypotheses matching strong syllables in the input is boosted and that of hypotheses mismatching strong syllables in the input penalised.
