The role of lexical status in the segmentation of fluent speech
Anne S. Henly, Howard C. Nusbaum · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1991
Theories of word recognition propose that listeners use lexical status to segment one word from another in fluent speech. Thus words must be recognized one at a time, in the order in which they were produced. This leads directly to the following predictions: (1) Words should be easier to identify following a word than following a nonword. (2) The lexical status of a syllable following a word should not affect the identification accuracy of that word. Subjects in the present experiment were asked to identify monosyllabic and trisyllabic target words presented in noise. Target words were presented with preceding word and nonword context syllables, as well as following word and nonword context syllables. Although the results confirm that listeners are able to use lexical status to facilitate segmentation, they also strongly suggest that listeners' use of lexical status is quite unlike the segmentation strategies proposed by most models of word recognition. [Research supported by NIDCD.]