A replication of competition and prosodic effects on spoken word recognition

Abstract

Despite the absence of clear and reliable word boundary markers, listeners recognize words in spoken sentences. A previous study tested a spoken-word recognition model, Shortlist, by asking speakers of British English to identify real words within nonwords (McQueen, Norris & Cutler, 1994). Some words were embedded within the onsets of longer words with either a weak-strong (WS) or strong-weak (SW) stress pattern (e.g., “mess” in /dəmɛs/, the onset of “domestic,” “sack” in /sækɹɪf/, the onset of “sacrifice"), and other words were embedded without a real word onset with either a WS or SW pattern (e.g., /nəmɛs/ or /mɛstəm/ for “mess” and /sækɹək/ or /kləsæk/ for “sack”). The original study reported both competition effects (e.g. competition from “domestic” hindered recognition of “mess") and prosodic effects (e.g. the stress in “mess” facilitated segmenting it from the preceding context). This current study aimed to replicate these results in American-English. Despite the different listener population and dialect, pilot results for the current study confirm both types of effect. This data will be used to test a new American English version of the Shortlist-B model of spoken word recognition (Norris & McQueen, 2008).