Stimulus-based similarity and the recognition of spoken words
Edward T. Auer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2003
Spoken word recognition has been hypothesized to be achieved via a competitive process amongst perceptually similar lexical candidates in the mental lexicon. In this process, lexical candidates are activated as a function of their perceived similarity to the spoken stimulus. The evidence supporting this hypothesis has largely come from studies of auditory word recognition. In this talk, evidence from our studies of visual spoken word recognition will be reviewed. Visual speech provides the opportunity to highlight the importance of stimulus-driven perceptual similarity because it presents a different pattern of segmental similarity than is afforded by auditory speech degraded by noise. Our results are consistent with stimulus-driven activation followed by competition as general spoken word recognition mechanism. In addition, results will be presented from recent investigations of the direct prediction of perceptual similarity from measurements of spoken stimuli. High levels of correlation have been observed between the predicted and perceptually obtained distances for a large set of spoken consonants. These results support the hypothesis that the perceptual structure of English consonants and vowels is predicted by stimulus structure without the need for an intervening level of abstract linguistic representation. [Research supported by NSF IIS 9996088 and NIH DC04856.]