Abstract
Application of a phonological rule is often conditioned by prosodic structure, which may create a potential perceptual ambiguity, calling for phonological inferencing. Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine how spoken word recognition may be modulated by the interaction between the prosodically-conditioned rule application and phonological inferencing. The rule examined was post-obstruent tensing (POT) in Korean, which changes a lax consonant into a tense after an obstruent only within a prosodic domain of Accentual Phrase (AP). Results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that, upon hearing a derived tense form, listeners indeed recovered its underlying (lax) form. The phonological inferencing effect, however, was observed only in the absence of its tense competitor which was acoustically matched with the auditory input. In Experiment 3, a prosodic cue to an AP boundary (which blocks POT) was created before the target using an F0 cue alone (i.e., without any temporal cues), and the phonological inferencing effect disappeared. This supports the view that phonological inferencing is modulated by listeners’ online computation of prosodic structure (rather than through a low-level temporal normalization). Further analyses of the time course of eye movement suggested that the prosodic modulation effect occurred relatively later in the lexical processing. This implies that speech processing involves segmental processing in conjunction with prosodic structural analysis, and calls for further research on how prosodic information is processed along with segmental information in language-specific vs. universally applicable ways.
Highlights
In spoken language, segments are always produced in an organized way within a prosodic structure of a given utterance, and phonetic realization of a segment is often determined by where in the prosodic structure it occurs, leading to position-specific phonetic and/or phonological variation [1,2,3]
To further substantiate that there is no difference between the tense and tensified productions, we ran a Bayesian t-test using the default priors implemented in the R package BayesFactor. This analysis leads to a Bayes Factor (BF) as a test statistic [39], which allows an estimation of how well the null hypothesis is supported by the data, with values below one third being considered good evidence for the null hypothesis
The results revealed a clear effect of IP boundary on speech perception in connection with the domain of post-obstruent tensing (POT)
Summary
Segments are always produced in an organized way within a prosodic structure of a given utterance, and phonetic realization of a segment is often determined by where in the prosodic structure it occurs, leading to position-specific phonetic and/or phonological variation [1,2,3]. Consider a phonetic form that is ambiguous between voiced (with a short-lag VOT) and voiceless (with a long-lag VOT) categories along the VOT continuum in English This form is likely to be perceived as a voiceless stop when presented in a prosodic context in which a voiceless stop is produced with a relatively shorter VOT (e.g., phrase-medial position). The same phonetic form is likely to be perceived as a voiced stop when presented in a prosodic context (e.g., phrase-initial position) in which a voiceless stop is produced with a relatively longer VOT [14, 16] This implies that listeners compute prosodic structure and modulate perception of segments by making reference to the granularity of segmental variation that arises with prosodic structure that is being computed online in speech processing (e.g., [13, 17, 18])
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