The Effect of Speaking Rate on the Role of the Uniqueness Point in Spoken Word Recognition

Abstract

Using gender decision and shadowing tasks, we compared recognition of French nouns with early or late uniqueness points (UP) that were articulated at three different rates. With gender decision, the medium rate (3.6 syllables (syll)/s), which is close to that used by Radeau, Mousty, and Bertelson (1989), gave rise to a comparable UP location effect. The effect increased at the slower rate (2.2 syll/s), but disappeared at the faster rate (5.6 syll/s). With shadowing, only the slow rate gave rise to a UP effect. A similar pattern of results was found using speech that was linearly compressed or expanded. Because the fast rate is close to that typical of conversational speech, the present results cast doubt on the relevance of the UP in the processing of fluent speech. The implications of rate effects for models of spoken word recognition are discussed.