The enhancing effect of subsequent context in the perception of the sentence-initial word

Abstract

The authors examined whether the perception of the initial word in a Japanese sentence is enhanced by semantically related subsequent context. Phonemic restoration effects under periodic noise replacement were compared for two types of sentences. In the first condition, the initial word of a sentence was semantically predictable from the subsequent context (high-predictability condition). In the second condition, the initial word was not directly predictable from the subsequent context (low-predictability condition). The intelligibility of the sentence-initial words was higher in the high-predictability condition than in the low-predictability condition (58% vs 10%). On the other hand, the intelligibility of the subsequent portions was not significantly different between the two conditions (71.1% vs 66.3%). These results show that word perception can be enhanced by subsequent semantic context in Japanese.