Word Identification in Fluent Speech

Abstract

A cross-modal lexical decision study explores whether temporary segmental ambiguity interferes with the process of word recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects are presented with fragments of speech that can be segmented either as a longer carrier word (e.g., visite, Italian for visits) or as a shorter embedded word whose following word starts with a syllable similar to the last syllable of the carrier (e.g., visi tediati, Italian for faces bored). The resorts indicate that in the latter case, subjects are still entertaining the hypothesis that the carrier word is being presented when they hear the first syllable of the following word. Experiment 3 suggests that such difficulties in segmentation do not disappear when the ambiguous pairs of stimuli contain acoustic cues that could guide the subjects′ segmentation strategies. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that segmentation difficulties interfere with word recognition, altering the time-course of activation. The relevance of these results for current models of speech processing and their incompatibility with strictly sequential views of speech segmentation and word recognition are discussed.