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Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

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Effects of syntactic expectations on speech segmentation.

Sven L Mattys¹, James F Melhorn, Laurence White

¹Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom. sven.mattys@bris.ac.uk

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

|August 9, 2007

Summary

Syntactic expectations aid speech segmentation, but their impact diminishes when acoustic cues conflict early on. This research explores how syntax influences word boundary detection.

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Speech Perception

Background:

Acoustic cues are well-studied for speech segmentation.
The role of higher-order information, like syntax, is less understood.
Subject-verb agreement provides a specific syntactic expectation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if syntactic expectations affect speech segmentation.
To determine if syntax influences segmentation even with conflicting acoustic cues.

Main Methods:

Participants performed word detection tasks in phrases with varying acoustic and syntactic congruence.
Reaction times for target word detection were measured.
Experiments manipulated sentence context (singular vs. plural) and acoustic cues.

Main Results:

Acoustic cues improved target word detection, but this effect was reduced by conflicting syntactic contexts.
Syntactically correct targets were detected faster irrespective of acoustic cues.
Singular contexts did not affect segmentation, unlike plural contexts.

Conclusions:

Syntactic knowledge can enhance speech segmentation.
The influence of syntax is significantly weakened by early conflicting acoustic cues.
The timing of syntactic expectation realization relative to acoustic cues is crucial.