Salience of the word as a unit in the perception of language

Abstract

Seven interlocking experiments are reported in which both guessing and recognition thresholds for words are compared with those for other linguistic units both smaller than (nonword morphemes and trigrams) and larger than (nominal compounds, ordinary noun phrases, and nonsense compounds) the word. Thresholds were consistently lower for words than for morphemes or trigams (matched or even much higher in visual usage frequency) and lower for word-like nominal compounds (e.g.,stumbling block) than for ordinary noun phrases (copper block) or nonsense compounds (sympathy block). Prior exposure (through two correct recognitions) to ordinary noun phrases, nonsense compounds, and the constituent single words of nominal compounds significantly facilitated subsequent recognition of the single-word constituents, but prior exposure to nominal compounds had no effect whatsoever on subsequent recognition of their sin~e-word constituents. These results as a whole are interpreted as supporting the following conclusions: (1)that the word has special salience in the perception of language; (2)that the reason for this salience is the unique meaningfulness of the word (or the word-like nominal compound) as a whole; and (3) that the mechanism for this salience is the convergence of feedback from central mediational processes with feed-forward from peripheral sensory processes upon the integration of word-form percepts.