Accuracy Of Spoken Word Recognition Research Articles

Accuracy of Spoken Word Recognition as a Predictor of Listening Comprehension for Japanese Learners of English

Accuracy of Spoken Word Recognition as a Predictor of Listening Comprehension for Japanese Learners of English

Effects of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness on spoken word recognition

The relative abilities of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness to predict accuracy of spoken word recognition in noise were compared using two data sets. Word frequency is the number of times a word appears in a corpus of text. Contextual diversity is the number of different documents in which the word appears in that corpus. Semantic distinctiveness takes into account the number of different semantic contexts in which the word appears. Semantic distinctiveness and contextual diversity were both able to explain variance above and beyond that explained by word frequency, which by itself explained little unique variance.

Clustering coefficients of lexical neighborhoods: Does neighborhood structure matter in spoken word recognition?

High neighborhood density reduces the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. The two studies reported here investigated whether Clustering Coefficient (CC) - a graph theoretic variable measuring the degree to which a word's neighbors are neighbors of one another, has similar effects on spoken word recognition. In Experiment 1, we found that high CC words were identified less accurately when spectrally degraded than low CC words. In Experiment 2, using a word repetition procedure, we observed longer response latencies for high CC words compared to low CC words. Taken together, the results of both studies indicate that higher CC leads to slower and less accurate spoken word recognition. The results are discussed in terms of activation-plus-competition models of spoken word recognition.

How vocabulary size in two languages relates to efficiency in spoken word recognition by young Spanish–English bilinguals

Research using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language associations were weak: vocabulary size in Spanish was uncorrelated with vocabulary in English, and children's facility in online comprehension in Spanish was unrelated to their facility in English. Instead, efficiency of online processing in one language was significantly related to vocabulary size in that language, after controlling for processing speed and vocabulary size in the other language. These links between efficiency of lexical access and vocabulary knowledge in bilinguals parallel those previously reported for Spanish and English monolinguals, suggesting that children's ability to abstract information from the input in building a working lexicon relates fundamentally to mechanisms underlying the construction of language.

Recognition of gated verbs by children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment: Effects of inflection and frequency

A common feature of language disorders, particularly in English, is an impairment in inflectional morphology. One view claims that this deficit is caused by impaired speech processing and resulting impoverished phonological representations. We investigated the accuracy of spoken word recognition in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) using a successive forward gating paradigm, with target verbs manipulated for frequency and past tense inflection. Children with Grammatical-SLI were compared to age and language controls. We scored responses according to (1) proportion of gates to the first correct response, (2) proportion of gates to the first of three consistently correct responses. G-SLI children generally performed at the same level as age and vocabulary controls, although worse than age controls on uninflected verbs with respect to the second criterion, indicating that they activated the correct word at the same point, but took longer to reach a consistent response. Low frequency and inflection of the target word did not disadvantage G-SLI children to a greater extent than any of their controls. These results do not support the hypothesis that G-SLI children's morphological impairment is caused by poor acoustic-phonetic processing.

Hemispheric differences in indexical specificity effects in spoken word recognition.

Variability in talker identity, one type of indexical variation, has demonstrable effects on the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. Furthermore, neuropsychological evidence suggests that indexical and linguistic information may be represented and processed differently in the 2 cerebral hemispheres, and is consistent with findings from the visual domain. For example, in visual word recognition, changes in font affect processing differently depending on which hemisphere initially processes the input. The present study examined whether hemispheric differences exist in spoken language as well. In 4 long-term repetition-priming experiments, the authors examined responses to stimuli that were primed by stimuli that matched or mismatched in talker identity. The results demonstrate that indexical variability can affect participants' perception of spoken words differently in the 2 hemispheres.

Examining the Time Course of Indexical Specificity Effects in Spoken Word Recognition.

Variability in talker identity and speaking rate, commonly referred to as indexical variation, has demonstrable effects on the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. The present study examines the time course of indexical specificity effects to evaluate the hypothesis that such effects occur relatively late in the perceptual processing of spoken words. In 3 long-term repetition priming experiments, the authors examined reaction times to targets that were primed by stimuli that matched or mismatched on the indexical variable of interest (either talker identity or speaking rate). Each experiment was designed to manipulate the speed with which participants processed the stimuli. The results demonstrate that indexical variability affects participants' perception of spoken words only when processing is relatively slow and effortful.

Influence of semantic similarity on spoken word recognition

Previous research has shown that the number of phonologically similar items influences the processing of spoken words (e.g., Vitevitch, 2002; Vitevitch and Luce, 1998). The present experiment examines the influence of semantic similarity on the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition using a lexical decision task. Semantic density refers to the number of words that are semantically associated to a given word (Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreiber, 1998). A word that has relatively many semantically associated words has high semantic density and a word that has relatively few semantically associated words has low semantic density. The results showed that words with high semantic density were responded to more quickly and accurately than words with low semantic density, suggesting that semantic information influences spoken word recognition.

Spoken word recognition and the influence of lexical competitors at the beginning of a word

Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978) suggest that the initial portion of a word activates multiple lexical candidates in memory, forming a ‘‘cohort’’ of competitors. Marslen-Wilson (1987) further states that the number of competitors in the cohort does not affect the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. Monosyllabic CVC words with the same number of lexical competitors (using a substitution-based metric to estimate competitor set size) but varying in the percentage of competitors sharing the same initial phoneme as the target word were presented in an auditory naming task and an auditory lexical decision task. Words with a smaller proportion of competitors sharing the same initial phoneme as the target word were responded to more quickly than words with a larger proportion of competitors sharing the same initial phoneme as the target word. These results suggest that the number of candidates activated in memory does affect spoken word recognition, and that the initial portion of a word is important in processing. The implications of these results for models of spoken word recognition are discussed. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD Training Grant DC-00012.]

Building lexical neighborhoods.

The Neighborhood Activation Model (NAM) states that the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are a function of the number and nature of neighbors—or similar sounding words—activated in memory by stimulus input. In particular, the model states that spoken word recognition is a function of (1) target word frequency, (2) similarity neighborhood density, and (3) similarity neighborhood frequency. In a pretest–training –posttest design, these three factors were manipulated using nonword target words and nonword neighbors to test directly predictions of NAM. The results were only partially consistent with the model. As predicted, processing times to high‐frequency targets increased as a function of neighborhood density. However, processing times for low‐frequency targets actually decreased with increased neighborhood density. Furthermore, no significant effects of neighborhood frequency were obtained. The implications of these findings for NAM and other models of spoken word recognition are discussed.

Syntagmatic and paradigmatic states in spoken word recognition

The process of spoken word recognition has frequently been characterized as a mapping of information through a multidimensional space, the dimensions of which correspond to time and acoustic-phonetic similarity. Within this framework, the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition is a direct function of the ease of traversing a path through the space. The traversal of a path may be affected by at least two states of the space at any point in processing: The first, or syntagmatic, state refers to the history and future of the path. The syntagmatic states of a word correspond to its ‘‘probabilistic’’ phonotactics. The second, or paradigmatic, state refers to the degree of activation within the space at any point (or what has previously been referred to as ‘‘neighborhood activation’’). A connectionist instantiation will be presented of this framework that attempts to predict the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition as function of syntagmatic and paradigmatic states. Also discussed is a number of empirical tests of the model that provide further insights into the roles of phonotactics and neighborhood structure in spoken word recognition. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. DC-00879-01 to the State University of New York at Buffalo.]