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Effects of lexical stress on phonetic categorization
C M Connine1, C Clifton, A Cutler
1Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Phonetica
|January 1, 1987
Summary
Listeners use word stress to recognize speech, favoring real words over nonwords even when acoustic cues are ambiguous. This study shows lexical knowledge influences auditory word recognition.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Speech Perception
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Auditory word recognition is complex, involving integration of acoustic and lexical information.
- The role of lexical properties, such as stress, in resolving acoustic ambiguity is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how lexical stress influences auditory word recognition.
- To determine if listeners' perception of speech sounds is biased by the lexical status of the word.
Main Methods:
- Creation of speech voicing continua where endpoints were either real words or nonwords.
- Presentation of these continua to subjects to assess their identification of initial speech segments.
- Analysis of listener responses to identify biases in perception.
Main Results:
- Listeners showed a bias towards identifying speech segments as real words, even in the ambiguous midrange of the continua.
- This lexical bias persisted despite acoustic variations.
- Acoustically based explanations were insufficient to account for the observed data.
Conclusions:
- Lexical stress significantly impacts auditory word recognition.
- Listeners utilize lexical knowledge to resolve acoustic ambiguities in speech perception.
- The findings support a lexically driven account of speech perception mechanisms.