Activation of embedded words in spoken word recognition.
Jean Vroomen, Béatrice de Gelder · Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance · 1997
Three cross-modal associative priming experiments investigated whether speech input activates words that are embedded in other words.When the embedded word corresponded to the final syllable of a bisyllabic carrier (boos, meaning angry embedded in framboos, meaning raspberry), facilitatory priming effects were observed for related targets of the embedded word.No effects were found when the end-embedded word did not start at the onset of a syllable (wijn meaning wine in zwijn meaning swine).Beginning-embedded words were activated only if the carder was a nonword (vel meaning skin in velk), but not when the carder was a word (vel in velg, meaning r/m).The results support the joint operation of metric segmentation and lexical competition: Words are activated if their onset matches the onset of a strong syllable; words are then excluded on the basis of interword competition.Continuous speech contains very few reliable cues to the location of word boundaries.Nevertheless, listeners are rarely conscious of any difficulty resolving such ambiguities as words are recognized correctly and immediately without apparent mental effort.However, there is clear evidence that, before a word is recognized, numerous incorrect lexical hypotheses are entertained by the speech recognition system without the listener being aware of them.The way in which these lexical hypotheses are generated can provide insights into how continuous speech is segmented into discrete words.In the literature, there are at least two general proposals about how speech is segmented.The first is a postlexical strategy by which words are recognized in the strict order in which they were spoken (Cole & Jakimik, 1980;Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978).One of the best known examples is the early version of the Cohort model (Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978).In early Cohort, word boundaries emerge when the current word is recognized.Words sharing the same onset are all accessed in parallel during recognition,