Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T05:35:21.442Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Discourse context and the recognition of reduced and canonical spoken words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2012

SUSANNE BROUWER ,
HOLGER MITTERER  and
FALK HUETTIG
SUSANNE BROUWER*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
HOLGER MITTERER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
FALK HUETTIG
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Susanne Brouwer, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: s-brouwer@northwestern.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., “puter”) more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., “computer”). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words. Target word recognition was assessed by measuring eye fixation proportions to four printed words on a visual display: the target, a “reduced form” competitor, a “canonical form” competitor, and an unrelated distractor. Target sentences were presented in isolation or with a wider discourse context. Experiment 1 revealed that target recognition was facilitated by wider discourse information. It is important that the recognition of reduced forms improved significantly when preceded by strongly rather than by weakly supportive discourse contexts. This was not the case for canonical forms: listeners’ target word recognition was not dependent on the degree of supportive context. Experiment 2 showed that the differential context effects in Experiment 1 were not due to an additional amount of speaker information. Thus, these data suggest that in natural settings a strongly supportive discourse context is more important for the recognition of reduced forms than the recognition of canonical forms.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 519 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aglioti, S. M., Cesari, P., Romani, M., & Urgesi, C. (2008). Action anticipation and motor resonance in elite basketball players. Nature Neuroscience, 11, 1109–1116.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73, 247–264.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (2004). Now you see it, now you don't: Mediating the mapping between language and visual world. In Henderson, J. & Ferreira, F. (Eds.), The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (2007). The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and world knowledge: Linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 502–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (2009). Discourse-mediation of the mapping between language and the visual world: Eye-movements and mental representation. Cognition, 111, 55–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J. (2008). Analyzing “visual world” eye tracking data using multilevel logistic regression. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 457–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, A., Jurafsky, D., Fosler-Lussier, E., Girand, C., Gregory, M., & Gildea, D. (2003). Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113, 1001–1024.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boersma, P. (2001). PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5, 341–345.Google Scholar
Bradlow, A. R., Nygaard, L. C., & Pisoni, D. B. (1999). Effects of talker, rate, and amplitude variation on recognition memory for spoken words. Perception & Psychophysics, 61, 206–219.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Connine, C. M., Ranbom, L. J., & Patterson, D. J. (2008). Processing variant forms in spoken word recognition: The role of variant frequency. Perception & Psychophysics, 70, 403–411.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Connolly, J. F., & Phillips, N. A. (1994). Event-related potential components reflect phonological and semantic processing of the terminal word of spoken sentences. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 6, 256–266.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language. A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 84–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahan, D., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2004). Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in spoken-language comprehension: Evidence from immediate effects of verb-based constraints. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 30, 498–513.Google Scholar
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., & Enfield, N. (2006). Projecting the end of a speaker's turn: A cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language, 82, 515–535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisner, F., & McQueen, J. M. (2005). The specificity of perceptual learning in speech processing. Perception & Psychophysics, 67, 224–238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ernestus, M. (2000). Voice assimilation and segment reduction in casual Dutch. A corpus based study of the phonology-phonetics interface. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Ernestus, M., Baayen, H., & Schreuder, R. (2002). The recognition of reduced word forms. Brain and Language, 81, 162–173.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension. Psychophysiology, 44, 491–505.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Floccia, C., Goslin, J., Girard, F., & Konopczynski, G. (2006). Does a regional accent perturb speech processing? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 1276–1293.Google ScholarPubMed
Gaskell, M. G., & Snoeren, N. D. (2008). The impact of strong assimilation on the perception of connected speech. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34, 1632–1647.Google ScholarPubMed
Goldinger, S. D. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review, 105, 251–279.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gow, D. W. (2002). Does English coronal place assimilation create lexical ambiguity? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 28, 163–179.Google Scholar
Huettig, F., & Altmann, G. T. M. (2007). Visual-shape competition during language-mediated attention is based on lexical input and not modulated by contextual appropriateness. Visual Cognition, 15, 985–1018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huettig, F., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). The tug of war between phonological, semantic and shape information in language-mediated visual search. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 460–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huettig, F., Rommers, J., & Meyer, A. S. (2011). Using the visual world paradigm to study language processing: A review and critical evaluation. Acta Psychologica, 137, 151–171.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huettig, F., Singh, N., & Mishra, R. K. (2010). Language-mediated prediction is modulated by formal literacy. Paper presented at the Brain, Speech, and Orthography Workshop, October 15–16, Brussels.Google Scholar
Johnson, K. (1997). Speech perception without speaker normalization: An exemplar model. In Johnson, K. & Mullennix, J. W. (Eds.), Talker Variability in Speech Processing (pp. 145–165). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, K. (2004). Massive reduction in conversational American English. In Yoneyama, K. & Maekawa, K. (Eds.), Spontaneous speech: Data and analysis. Proceedings of the 1st session of the 10th International Symposium (pp. 29–54). Tokyo: National International Institute for Japanese Language.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Gregory, M., & Raymond, W. D. (2001). Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (Eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 229–254). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S. L. (2003). Prediction and thematic information in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 133–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamide, Y., Scheepers, C., & Altmann, G. T. M. (2003). Integration of syntactic and semantic information in predictive processing: Cross-linguistic evidence from German and English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 37–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kemps, R., Ernestus, M., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, H. (2004). Processing reduced word forms: The suffix restoration effect. Brain and Language, 90, 117–127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kraljic, T., Brennan, S. E., & Samuel, A. G. (2008). Accommodating variation: Dialects, idiolects, and speech processing. Cognition, 107, 51–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kraljic, T., & Samuel, A. G. (2005). Perceptual learning for speech: Is there a return to normal? Cognitive Psychology, 51, 141–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A. (1984). Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association. Nature, 307, 161–163.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ladefoged, P., & Broadbent, D. E. (1957). Information conveyed by vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27, 98–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lahiri, A., & Reetz, H. (2002). Underspecified recognition. In Gussenhoven, C., Warner, N., & Rietveld, T. (Eds.), Labphon 7 (pp. 637–676). Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P. (1963). Some effects of semantic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech. Language and Speech, 6, 172–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H and H theory. In Hardcastle, W. & Marchal, A. (Eds.), Speech production and speech modelling (pp. 403–439). Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matin, E., Shao, K. C., & Boff, K. R. (1993). Saccadic overhead: Information-processing time with and without saccades. Perception and Psychophysics, 53, 372–380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McQueen, J. M., & Viebahn, M. (2007). Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 661–671.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitterer, H. (2006). Is vowel normalization independent of lexical processing? Phonetica, 63, 209–229.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitterer, H. (2011). The mental lexicon is fully specified: Evidence from eye-tracking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37, 496–513.Google Scholar
Mitterer, H., & Blomert, L. (2003). Coping with phonological assimilation in speech perception: Evidence for early compensation. Perception and Psychophysics, 65, 956–969.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitterer, H., Chen, Y., & Zhou, X. (2011). Phonological abstraction in processing lexical tone variation: Evidence from a learning paradigm. Cognitive Science, 35, 184–197.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mori, S., Ohtani, Y., & Imanaka, K. (2002). Reaction times and anticipatory skills of karate athletes. Human Movement Science, 21, 213–220.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mullennix, J. W., Pisoni, D. B., & Martin, C. S. (1989). Some effects of talker variability on spoken word recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 85, 365–378.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newman, R. S., & Sawusch, J. R. (1996). Perceptual normalization for speaking rate: Effects of temporal distance. Perception & Psychophysics, 58, 540–560.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology, 47, 204–238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norris, D. G. (1994). Shortlist: A connectionist model of continuous speech recognition. Cognition, 52, 189–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nygaard, L. C., & Pisoni, D. B. (1998). Talker-specific learning in speech perception. Perception & Psychophysics, 60, 335–376.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nygaard, L. C., Sommers, M. S., & Pisoni, D. B. (1994). Speech perception as a talker-contingent process. Psychological Science, 5, 42–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oostdijk, N. (2000). The Spoken Dutch Corpus Project. ELRA Newsletter, 5, 4–8.Google Scholar
Palmeri, T. J., Goldinger, S. D., & Pisoni, D. B. (1993). Episodic encoding of voice attributes and recognition memory for spoken words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 309–328.Google ScholarPubMed
Pitt, M. A. (2009). How are pronunciation variants of spoken words recognized? A test of generalization to newly learned words. Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 19–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ranbom, L. J., & Connine, C. M. (2007). Lexical representation of phonological variation in spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 273–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samuel, A. G., & Kraljic, T. (2009). Perceptual learning in speech perception. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 71, 1207–1218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiller, N. O., Horemans, I., Ganushchak, L., & Koester, D. (2009). Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors. NeuroImage, 44, 520–530.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Swinney, D. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re) consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 645–659.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tabossi, P. (1988). Accessing lexical ambiguity in different types of sentential context. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 324–340.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension, Science, 268, 1632–1634.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Berkum, J. J. A., Brown, C. M., Zwitserlood, P., Kooijman, V., & Hagoort, P. (2005). Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 443–467.Google ScholarPubMed
Van den Brink, D., Brown, C. M., & Hagoort, P. (2001). Electrophysiological evidence for early contextual influences during spoken-word recognition: N200 versus N400 effects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13, 967–985.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed