Factors contributing to the recovery of monosyllabic words excerpted from natural speech

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Words isolated from running speech have been found to be less intelligible than when they appear in the context of a sentence or phrase. Although auditory context, in general, provides additional information, the role of the immediately adjacent acoustic cues is unknown. In this investigation two adult males read in a comfortable manner 16 paragraphs from which a target sentence and a target word (CVC or CVCC) were excised. The words preceding and following each target word were selected so that the initial and final consonant were bounded by a shwa vowel. The intelligibility of the target word was essentially unaffected by the inclusion of the neighboring shwa vowels and only moderately increased by the inclusion of the immediately preceding and following words. Errors in intelligibility were ordered as follows: final consonant, vowel and initial consonant. It was concluded that tempo and spectral normalization, and linguistic expectancy disambiguate words which are initiated and terminated by obstruents and bounded by a vowel.