Attention to phonetic context across word boundaries
Jenny DeGroot, Howard C. Nusbaum · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1989
Variability in phonetic context affects phoneme perception. For example, subjects are slower to identify a target consonant when an adjacent context phoneme varies independently, compared to when context phonemes are constant across trials [C. C. Wood and R. S. Day, Percept. Psychophys. 17, 346–350 (1975)]. Further, this is true whether of not a syllable boundary intervenes between the target and the varying context, suggesting that subjects attend to phonetic context regardless of syllable structure [J. DeGroot and H. C. Nusbaum, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 85, S123 (1989)]. Do listeners similarly attend to phonetic context across a word boundary when recognizing a phoneme? In the present experiments, subjects identified a target phoneme, while an adjacent context phoneme either varied orthogonally or was held constant. In one stimulus set, the varying context occurred in the same word as the target; in the other stimulus set, the vrying context occurred in an adjacent word. Response times were measured to investigate whether the varying context slows target recognition across a word boundary as it does within a word. The results provide information about how listeners distribute their attention across the speech signal, and about the perceptual function of different linguistic units. [Research supported by NIH.]