Context effects in spoken language

Abstract

The effects of different types of linguistic context on the intelligibility of spoken language were examined. A set of words was produced by the same speakers in three different types of linguistic context: ordinary sentences, anomalous sentences, and a word list context. The anomalous sentences were constructed by changing one nonadjacent‐to‐target word to an anomalous alternative. The word list context was set up as short, sentencelike strings, seven words in length, including the target word. In the production phase of the experiment, speakers were instructed to speak with the same intonation over all the materials. To encourage this, the different context types were randomly interleaved in the materials which speakers read. No significant differences were found in the intelligibility of the words produced in the different context conditions. It is argued that these results demonstrate that, contrary to the findings of (Lieberman, 1963), it is the overall speech “mode,” rather than the immediate linguistic context, which acts to determine the intelligibility with which individual words are produced.