Information In Spoken Word Recognition Research Articles

Spoken second language words activate native language orthographic information in late second language learners

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the time course of activation of orthographic information in spoken word recognition with two visual world eye-tracking experiments in a task where second language (L2) spoken word forms had to be matched with their printed referents. Participants (n= 64) were native Finnish learners of L2 French ranging from beginners to highly proficient. In Experiment 1, L2 targets (e.g.,<cidre>/sidʀ/) were presented with either orthographically overlapping onset competitors (e.g.,<cintre>/sɛ̃tʀ/) or phonologically overlapping onset competitors (<cycle>/sikl/). In Experiment 2, L2 targets (e.g.,<paume>/pom/) were associated with competitors in Finnish, L1 of the participants, in conditions symmetric to Experiment 1 (<pauhu>/pauhu/ vs.<pommi>/pom:i/). In the within-language experiment (Experiment 1), the difference in target identification between the experimental conditions was not significant. In the between-language experiment (Experiment 2), orthographic information impacted the mapping more in lower proficiency learners, and this effect was observed 600 ms after the target word onset. The influence of proficiency on the matching was nonlinear: proficiency impacted the mapping significantly more in the lower half of the proficiency scale in both experiments. These results are discussed in terms of coactivation of orthographic and phonological information in L2 spoken word recognition.

A novel eye tracking paradigm for assessing semantic and phonologic activation in aphasia

A novel eye tracking paradigm for assessing semantic and phonologic activation in aphasia

Processing Lexical and Speaker Information in Repetition and Semantic/Associative Priming.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between processing lexical and speaker-specific information in spoken word recognition. The specific question is whether repetition and semantic/associative priming is reduced when the prime and target are produced by different speakers. In Experiment 1, the prime and target were repeated (e.g., queen-queen) or unrelated (e.g., bell-queen). In Experiment 2, the prime and target were semantically/associatively related (e.g., king-queen) or unrelated (e.g., bell-queen). In both experiments, the prime and target were either produced by the same male speaker or two different male speakers. Two interstimulus intervals between the prime and target were used to examine the time course of processing speaker information. The tasks for the participants included judging the lexical status of the target (lexical decision), followed by judging whether the prime and target were produced by the same speaker or different speakers (speaker discrimination). The results showed that both lexical decision and speaker discrimination were facilitated to a smaller extent when the prime and target were produced by different speakers, indicating reduced repetition priming by speaker variability. In contrast, semantic/associative priming was not affected by speaker variability. The ISI between the prime and target did not affect either type of priming. In conclusion, speaker variability affects accessing a word's form but not its meaning, suggesting that speaker-specific information is processed at a relatively shallow level.

Orthographic Activation in L2 Spoken Word Recognition Depends on Proficiency: Evidence from Eye-Tracking.

The use of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word recognition was studied in a visual world task where L1 Finnish learners of L2 French (n = 64) and L1 French native speakers (n = 24) were asked to match spoken word forms with printed words while their eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1, French target words were contrasted with competitors having a longer (<base> vs. <bague>) or a shorter word initial phonological overlap (<base> vs. <bain>) and an identical orthographic overlap. In Experiment 2, target words were contrasted with competitors of either longer (<mince> vs. <mite>) or shorter word initial orthographic overlap (<mince> vs. <mythe>) and of an identical phonological overlap. A general phonological effect was observed in the L2 listener group but not in the L1 control group. No general orthographic effects were observed in the L2 or L1 groups, but a significant effect of proficiency was observed for orthographic overlap over time: higher proficiency L2 listeners used also orthographic information in the matching task in a time-window from 400 to 700 ms, whereas no such effect was observed for lower proficiency listeners. These results suggest that the activation of orthographic information in L2 spoken word recognition depends on proficiency in L2.

Early use of orthographic information in spoken word recognition: Event-related potential evidence from the Korean language.

This study examines whether orthographic information is used during prelexical processes in spoken word recognition by investigating ERPs during spoken word processing for Korean words. Differential effects due to orthographic syllable neighborhood size and sound-to-spelling consistency on P200 and N320 were evaluated by recording ERPs from 42 participants during a lexical decision task. The results indicate that P200 was smaller for words whose orthographic syllable neighbors are large in number rather than those that are small. In addition, a word with a large orthographic syllable neighborhood elicited a smaller N320 effect than a word with a small orthographic syllable neighborhood only when the word had inconsistent sound-to-spelling mapping. The results provide support for the assumption that orthographic information is used early during the prelexical spoken word recognition process.

Phonotactics Constraints and the Spoken Word Recognition of Chinese Words in Speech.

Two word-spotting experiments were conducted to examine the question of whether native Cantonese listeners are constrained by phonotactics information in spoken word recognition of Chinese words in speech. Because no legal consonant clusters occurred within an individual Chinese word, this kind of categorical phonotactics information of Chinese word may be most likely to cue native Cantonese listeners the locations of possible word boundaries in speech. The observed results from the two word-spotting experiments confirmed this prediction. Together with other relevant studies, we suggest that phonotactics constraint is one of the useful sources of information in spoken word recognition processes of Chinese words in speech.

Dissociation of tone and vowel processing in Mandarin idioms

Using event-related potentials, this study measured the access of suprasegmental (tone) and segmental (vowel) information in spoken word recognition with Mandarin idioms. Participants performed a delayed-response acceptability task, in which they judged the correctness of the last word of each idiom, which might deviate from the correct word in either tone or vowel. Results showed that, compared with the correct idioms, a larger early negativity appeared only for vowel violation. Additionally, a larger N400 effect was observed for vowel mismatch than tone mismatch. A control experiment revealed that these differences were not due to low-level physical differences across conditions; instead, they represented the greater constraining power of vowels than tones in the lexical selection and semantic integration of the spoken words. Furthermore, tone violation elicited a more robust late positive component than vowel violation, suggesting different reanalyses of the two types of information. In summary, the current results support a functional dissociation of tone and vowel processing in spoken word recognition.

Early use of phonetic information in spoken word recognition: Lexical stress drives eye movements immediately

For optimal word recognition listeners should use all relevant acoustic information as soon as it comes available. Using printed-word eye tracking we investigated when during word processing Dutch listeners use suprasegmental lexical stress information to recognize words. Fixations on targets such as "OCtopus" (capitals indicate stress) were more frequent than fixations on segmentally overlapping but differently stressed competitors ("okTOber") before segmental information could disambiguate the words. Furthermore, prior to segmental disambiguation, initially stressed words were stronger lexical competitors than noninitially stressed words. Listeners recognize words by immediately using all relevant information in the speech signal.

Tracking the time course of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition.

Two visual-world experiments evaluated the time course and use of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition using printed words as referents. Participants saw 4 words on a computer screen and listened to spoken sentences instructing them to click on one of the words (e.g., Click on the word bead). The printed words appeared 200 ms before the onset of the spoken target word. In Experiment 1, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree (e.g., bear) or a higher degree (e.g., bean) of phonological overlap with the target. Both competitors had the same degree of orthographic overlap with the target. There were more fixations to the competitors than to unrelated distractors. Crucially, the likelihood of fixating a competitor did not vary as a function of the amount of phonological overlap between target and competitor. In Experiment 2, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree (e.g., bare) or a higher degree (e.g., bear) of orthographic overlap with the target. Competitors were homophonous and thus had the same degree of phonological overlap with the target. There were more fixations to higher overlap competitors than to lower overlap competitors, beginning during the temporal interval where initial fixations driven by the vowel are expected to occur. The authors conclude that orthographic information is rapidly activated as a spoken word unfolds and is immediately used in mapping spoken words onto potential printed referents.

Constraints of lexical stress on lexical access in English: evidence from native and non-native listeners.

Four cross-modal priming experiments and two forced-choice identification experiments investigated the use of suprasegmental cues to stress in the recognition of spoken English words, by native (English-speaking) and non-native (Dutch) listeners. Previous results had indicated that suprasegmental information was exploited in lexical access by Dutch but not by English listeners For both listener groups, recognition of visually presented target words was faster, in comparison to a control condition, after stress-matching spoken primes, either monosyllabic (mus- from MUsic/muSEum) or bisyl-word recognition labic (admi-from ADmiral/admiRAtion). For native listeners, the effect of stress-mismatching bisyllabic primes was not different from that of control primes, but mismatching monosyllabic primes produced partial facilitation. For non-native listeners, both bisyllabic and monosyllabic stress-mismatching primes produced partial facilitation. Native English listeners thus can exploit suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition, but information from two syllables is used more effectively than information from one syllable. Dutch listeners are less proficient at using suprasegmental information in English than in their native language, but, as in their native language, use mono- and bisyllabic information to an equal extent. In forced-choice identification. Dutch listeners outperformed native listeners at correctly assigning a monosyllabic fragment (e.g.. mus-) to one of two words differing in stress.

Rule-governed missing information in spoken word recognition: Schwa vowel deletion

Vowel deletion is a phonological process in which an unstressed /inverted e/ (schwa) vowel is deleted during pronunciation. In Experiment 1, vowel-deleted and vowel-reduced versions of two- and three-syllable words rated for pronunciation acceptability showed reduced acceptability for deleted vowel versions with a greater decrement for two-syllable words. Experiments 2 and 3 used vowel-intact and vowel-deleted productions preceded by themselves (repetition prime), their alternative production (variant prime), or a control (unrelated) prime. Lexical decisions to three-syllable vowel-intact and vowel-deleted targets, as well as to two-syllable vowel-intact targets, showed greater priming in the repetition conditions than in the variant conditions. Two-syllable vowel-deleted targets, however, showed comparable repetition and variant priming. The results are discussed in terms of lexical activation and representation of phonological variants. A model is offered in which activation based on similarity triggers utilization of phonological inferences only when required for successful recognition.

Voornaam is not (really) a homophone: Lexical prosody and lexical access in Dutch.

Four experiments examined Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition. Isolated syllables excised from minimal stress pairs such as VOORnaam/voorNAAM could be reliably assigned to their source words. In lexical decision, no priming was observed from one member of minimal stress pairs to the other, suggesting that the pairs' segmental ambiguity was removed by suprasegmental information. Words embedded in nonsense strings were harder to detect if the nonsense string itself formed the beginning of a competing word, but a suprasegmental mismatch to the competing word significantly reduced this inhibition. The same nonsense strings facilitated recognition of the longer words of which they constituted the beginning, but again the facilitation was significantly reduced by suprasegmental mismatch. Together these results indicate that Dutch listeners effectively exploit suprasegmental cues in recognizing spoken words. Nonetheless, suprasegmental mismatch appears to be somewhat less effective in constraining activation than segmental mismatch.

Use of partial stimulus information in spoken word recognition without auditory stimulation

The identification of isolated words in speech-reading environments is extremely prone to error. Many of these errors are due to the impoverished nature of spoken stimuli when the only perceptual information available is visual; some estimates place the number of visually discriminable segments at just over 25% of the number discriminable in auditory-only environments. Previous research has shown that the confusion of lipreaders is patterned with respect to the perceptual discriminability of phonetic segments in visual-only environments. In addition, other sources of information such as phonotactic, lexical, and semantic constraints can play a role in speech-reading performance. The current study examined the speech-reading responses generated by 200 normal hearing participants observing 300 isolated English words spoken by 10 talkers each. The responses were analyzed to determine if errors were random or patterned in a way that belies the use of partial information and lexical constraints during the process of visual-only spoken word recognition.

Missing information in spoken word recognition: Nonreleased stop consonants.

Missing information in spoken word recognition: Nonreleased stop consonants.

Missing information in spoken word recognition: nonreleased stop consonants.

Cross-modal semantic priming and phoneme monitoring experiments investigated processing of word-final nonreleased stop consonants (e.g., kit may be pronounced /kit/ or /ki/), which are common phonological variants in American English. Both voiced /d/ and voiceless /t/ segments were presented in release and no-release versions. A cross-modal semantic priming task (Experiment 1) showed comparable priming for /d/ and /t/ versions. A second set of stimuli ending in /s/ were presented as intact, missing /s/, or with a mismatching final segment and showed significant but reduced priming for the latter two conditions. Experiment 2 showed that phoneme monitoring reaction time for release and no-release words and onset mismatching stimuli (derived pseudowords) increased as acoustic-phonetic similarity to the intended word decreased. The results suggest that spoken word recognition does not require special mechanisms for processing no-release variants. Rather, the results can be accounted for by means of existing assumptions concerning probabilistic activation that is based on partial activation.

Effects of Age and Hearing Sensitivity on the Use of Prosodic Information in Spoken Word Recognition

It is well known that spoken words can often be recognized from just their onsets and that older adults require a greater word onset duration for recognition than young adults. In this study, young and older adults heard either just word onsets, word onsets followed by white noise indicating the full duration of the target word, or word onsets followed by a low-pass-filtered signal that indicated the number of syllables and syllabic stress (word prosody) in the absence of segmental information. Older adults required longer stimulus durations for word recognition under all conditions, with age differences in hearing sensitivity contributing significantly to this age difference. Within this difference, however, word recognition was facilitated by knowledge of word prosody to the same degree for young and older adults. These findings suggest, first, that listeners can detect and utilize word stress in making perceptual judgments and, second, that this ability remains spared in normal aging.

Perception of suprasegmental structure in a non-native dialect

Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentless-variety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spoken-word recognition. In the first experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, differing in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns differed from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed significantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect affects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.

Probabilistic Phonotactics and Neighborhood Activation in Spoken Word Recognition

Recent work (Vitevitch & Luce, 1998) investigating the role of phonotactic information in spoken word recognition suggests the operation of two levels of representation, each having distinctly different consequences for processing. The lexical level is marked by competitive effects associated with similarity neighborhood activation, whereas increased probabilities of segments and sequences of segments facilitate processing at the sublexical level. We investigated the two proposed levels in six experiments using monosyllabic and specially constructed bisyllabic words and nonwords. The results of these studies provide further support for the hypothesis that the processing of spoken stimuli is a function of both facilitatory effects associated with increased phonotactic probabilities and competitive effects associated with the activation of similarity neighborhoods. We interpret these findings in the context of Grossberg, Boardman, and Cohen's (1997) adaptive resonance theory of speech perception.

The representation of voice information in spoken word recognition: Differential effects of repetition in lexical decision and recognition

Much recent research [e.g., Goldinger (1993)] has suggested that representations of spoken words in memory are veridical exemplars that encode specific information, such as characteristics of the talker’s voice. This exemplar account of phonetic form representations was examined in an experiment in which subjects heard two lists of words. The words in the first list were spoken by both a male and a female speaker. The words in the second list were (1) repetitions of words in the first list spoken by the same talker, (2) repetitions of words spoken by a different talker, or (3) new words. Subjects always made lexical decision responses to the stimuli in the first list. For the second list, subjects in one condition again made lexical decision responses; subjects in another condition performed a recognition task. Results indicated that changing the voice of the talker across lists had no effect on the repetition priming effect when subjects made lexical decisions to the second list. However, in the recognition task, reaction times were faster if the voice of the talker was preserved. These results are consistent with an exemplar-based account for recognition but also implicate the role of more abstract representations in identification. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

Lexical access codes in visual and auditory word recognition

Abstract Lexical access takes place when sensory information is matched to lexical information. The nature of the code in which this match takes place was examined in two experiments. The first experiment looked at auditory lexical processing and found that nonwords took longer to classify as nonwords if they formed the beginnings of real words, regardless of syllable structure. This was in contrast to a second experiment which employed a visual lexical decision task, where nonwords took longer to classify only if they formed the first syllable of a word. It was concluded that the access code that activates lexical information in spoken word recognition is the first few phonemes regardless of syllable structure, whereas in printed word recognition the access code is the first (orthographically defined) syllable.