Listeners can anticipate future segments before they identify the current one.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Auditory Perception
• Speech Processing

Background:

• Speech perception requires integrating rapidly unfolding acoustic cues.
• Listeners often integrate prior information and anticipate future speech segments.
• Previous research indicated listeners might delay lexical access for sibilant fricatives (/s/, /ʃ/) until all cues are present.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether listeners use coarticulatory information in fricatives to predict upcoming vowels.
• To determine the timing of anticipatory speech processing for sibilant fricatives.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a visual world paradigm experiment.
• Measured listener responses to fricative-vowel stimuli.
• Focused on the onset of frication and subsequent vowel identification.

Main Results:

• Listeners anticipate the upcoming vowel immediately upon hearing the frication onset.
• This anticipation occurs even though listeners delay identifying the fricative itself.
• The findings contradict the idea that listeners wait for all cues before initiating lexical access for sibilants.

Conclusions:

• Listeners do not strictly process phonemes in the order they appear in speech.
• Speech processing dynamics are largely internal and flexible, not rigidly tied to acoustic input timing.
• Anticipatory mechanisms in speech perception are rapid and efficient.