Accessing spoken words: The importance of word onsets.

Abstract

Approaches to spoken word recognition differ in the importance they assign to word onsets during lexical access. This research contrasted the hypothesis that lexical access is strongly directional with the hypothesis that word onsets are less important than the overall goodness of fit between input and lexical form. A cross-modal priming technique was used to investigate the extent to which a rhyme prime (a prime that differs only in its first segment from the word that is semantically associated with the visual probe) is as effective a prime as the original word itself. Earlier research had shown that partial primes that matched from word onset were very effective cross-modal primes. The present results show that, irrespective of whether the rhyme prime was a real word or not, and irrespective of the amount of overlap between the rhyme prime and the original word, the rhymes are much less effective primes than the full word. In fact, no overall priming effect could be detected at all except under conditions in which the competitor environment was very sparse. This suggests that word onsets do have a special status in the lexical access of spoken words.A fundamental property of the speech signal is its intrinsic directionality in time. Spoken utterances are spread out along the time line, moving necessarily from beginning to end, in a way that is not true of written language. This directionality of the speech input is strongly reflected in the claims made by the cohort model of spoken word recognition for the manner in which speech inputs are mapped onto the representations of word forms in the mental lexicon (

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

“…Indeed, through coarticulation, it is possible that longer competitors can be ruled out before the offset of an embedded word-at least for stimuli without garden-path following contexts. These results are consistent with prior work showing that single feature deviations at either the beginning (Connine, Blasko, & Titone, 1993;Marslen-Wilson et al, 1996;Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989) or the end of a word (Gaskell & MarslenWilson, 1996;Marslen-Wilson et al, 1995) are sufficient to disrupt the lexical access process.…”

How word onsets drive lexical access and segmentation: evidence from acoustics, phonology and processing

“…Similarly, derived citation form primes facilitate lexical decision for semantically related visual probe stimuli [21], and the same result has been found using an intramodal auditory priming paradigm with derived primes, and primes with phonetically ambiguous onset phonemes [22]. It should be noted that another study [23] failed to show priming by derived primes with word-initial segment features changed. These studies share several features.…”

Musical Features That Facilitate Melody Identification: How Do You Know It's “Your” Song When They Finally Play It?

“…In particular, the cohort theory of spoken word identification (Marslen-Wilson, 1987;Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980) would seem to be a good approximation to melody identification because no theory places a stronger emphasis on the temporal structure of the to-be-identified stimulus (Juscyzk & Luce, 2002). Briefly, the cohort model relies on bottom-up processing and places special weight on initial sounds of the word (Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989;Marslen-Wilson, Moss, & van Halen, 1996). Initial sounds activate a cohort of words from the lexicon that share those initial sounds.…”