Anticipatory coarticulation and reaction time to phoneme targets in spontaneous speech

The subject's task was to listen to continuous utterances and to press a reaction-time (RT) button upon hearing an assigned phoneme target. Stimulus materials were utterances of 7--13 syllables in length excised from tape-recorded spontaneous speech; each contained a target located in early, middle or late positions in the utterance. Either 200 msec of silence was tape-spliced into the utterance 33, 67, or 100 msec prior to the target, or the utterance was left intact (as spoken). The main results were faster RT to targets following the silent interval by 33 msec than to targets in the intact version or targets following the silent interval by 10 msec, that is, facilitative effects on target RT varied directly with proximity to target of silent interval. As with previous results using citation-form stimulus materials, these results were interpreted in terms of information from anticipatory coarticulation provided to the subject in advance, permitting extra time to allow the target to be anticipated across the silent interval.