Phonemic identification in a phoneme monitoring experiment: The variable role of uncertainty about vowel contexts

Swinney, David; Prather, Penny

doi:10.3758/bf03204296

Cited by 24 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This result is inconsistent with a hypothesis that could u priori be taken as reasonable and, according to which, facility of detection is an inverse function of the phonological complexity of the target. It would be consistent, however, with the uncertainty hypothesis (Foss & Swinney, 1973;Swinney & Prather, 1980). One potential explanation for the present target effect is that CVC targets are more frequently detected than CV targets, because in the first case more cues are available and so subjects' uncertainty diminishes.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Morais¹,

Cary

Mehler

et al. 1989

Language and Cognitive Processes

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A total of 40 unschooled Portuguese adults, either illiterates or ex-illiterates, were presented auditorily with short sentences and asked to detect the occurrence of a word initiated by a specified syllable-sized target. The target was either CV or CVC, and the target-bearing word was initiated by either a CV or a CVC syllable. The dependent variable was the number of correct detections. Ex-illiterates performed better than illiterates. There was a significant interaction between target type and word structure: Detections were more numerous when the target coincided with the first syllable of the target-bearing word than when it did not. This effect is similar to the one obtained by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, and^Segui (1981) in a reaction-time study with French literate subjects, and shows evidence of a syllabification procedure. The fact that this syllable effect is obtained with illiterate subjects, regardless of their overall performance, suggests that the development of a syllabification procedure in speech processing depends primarily on informal experience with the language rather than on formal instruction.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Morais¹,

Cary

Mehler

et al. 1989

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…Consonant with the findings of Experiment IV and those of Sequi et al are data obtained by Swinney and Prather (1980). They found that RTs to /b/-initial CVCs were directly related to the uncertainty of the following vowel.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

Cracking the dual code: toward a unitary model of phoneme identification

Foss

Gernsbacher

1983

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

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The results of five experiments on the nature of the speech code and on the role of sentence context on speech processing are reported. The first three studies test predictions from the dual code model of phoneme identification (Foss, D. J., & Blank, M. A. Cognitive Psychology, 1980, 12, 1-31). According to that model, subjects in a phoneme monitoring experiment respond to a prelexical code when engaged in a relatively easy task, and to a postlexical code when the task is difficult. The experiments controlled ease of processing either by giving subjects multiple targets for which to monitor or by preceding the target with a similar-sounding phoneme that draws false alarms. The predictions from the model were not sustained. Furthermore, evidence for a paradoxical nonword superiority effect was observed. In Experiment IV reaction times (RTs) to all possible /d/-initial CVCs were gathered. RTs were unaffected by the target item's status as a word or nonword. but they were affected by the internal phonetic structure of the target-bearing item. Vowel duration correlated highly (0.627) with RTs. Experiment V examined previous work purporting to demonstrate that semantic predictability affects how the speech code is processed, in particular that semantic predictability leads to responses based upon a postlexical code. That study found "predictability" effects when words occurred in isolation; further, it found that vowel duration and other phonetic factors can account parsimoniously for the existing results. These factors also account for the apparent nonword superiority effects observed earlier. Implications of the present work for theoretical models that stress the interaction between semantic context and speech processing are discussed, as are implications for use of the phoneme monitoring task.When listeners process spoken language they develop a series of representations of the input which range in content from the low level physical structure of the speech signal to a high level semantic representation. A theory of comprehension must specify the nature of those representations or codes, and must detail the mechanisms by which they are developed. Here we will be concerned with two subproblems in the general area of speech perception. One question that we will address, one that has received considerable attention, is whether the listener computes a representation of the input whose units are relatively low level phonetic segments. Our second question is whether and to what extent the processing of low level codes is affected by the ongoing syntactic and semantic analyses of the input, that is, whether the codes truly interact in some way.

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“…This was also true of the materials used by, for instance, Foss and Swinney (1973) and Segui et al (1981). In contrast, other experiments used sequences of syllables (e.g., Savin & Bever, 1970;Swinney & Prather, 1980). McNeill and Lindig (1973) showed that the use of syllable sequences will tend to produce faster responses to syllables because syllable targets match the level of all items in a sequence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 73%

“…The experimental evidence to date, especially from reaction-time studies, seems to favor the syllable. Many studies have compared detection time for phoneme and syllable targets, and have consistently found syllables to be identified more rapidly than phonemes (Foss & Swinney, 1973;Mills, 1980b;Savin & Bever, 1970;Swinney & Prather, 1980). Two studies, it is true, have suggested that phonemes can be identified faster than syllables under certain conditions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mills (1980b) and Swinney and Prather (1980) have demonstrated that targets that more closely accord with the listener's expectancies about how the target will sound are identified more rapidly. In Mehler et al's experiment, then, subjects presented with the target specification ba might have simply converted it into an internal representation that was a better perceptual match to the beginning of balance than to the beginning of balcon.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The relative accessibility of phonemes and syllables

Norris

Cutler

1988

Perception & Psychophysics

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Previous research comparing detection times for syllables and for phonemes has consistently found that syllables are responded to faster than phonemes. This finding poses theoretical problems for strictly hierarchical models of speech recognition, in which smaller units should be able to be identified faster than larger units. However, inspection of the characteristics of previous experiments' stimuli reveals that subjects have been able to respond to syllables on the basis of only a partial analysis of the stimulus. In the present experiment, five groups of subjects listened to identical stimulus material. Phoneme and syllable monitoring under standard conditions was compared with monitoring under conditions in which near matches of target and stimulus occurred on no-response trials. In the latter case, when subjects were forced to analyze each stimulus fully, phonemes were detected faster than syllables.Speech recognition involves the matching of spoken word forms to lexical representations. In principle, this could be achieved by a simple exhaustive templatematching process. However, the number of potential lexical representations to be checked, and the difficulty of determining, in a continuous speech signal, where word forms begin and end, suggests that simple template matching would be a relatively cumbersome method of accessing lexical representations. Greater efficiency would be achieved with a preliminary classification of the speech signal, using a relatively small set of units of which any word form will be composed. Such a classification would greatly simplify the lexical access process, because exhaustive search of all representations would not be necessary. If the stored representations were arranged in an order determined by the units of classification, the preliminary analysis would allow the lexical forms to be accessed directly, in just the way that alphabetic arrangement of a dictionary allows an entry to be found without uncertainty.For this reason, psycholinguists have expended considerable effort on investigating whether there are such "units of speech perception." The main candidates have been the syllable and the phoneme. The phoneme has the advantage of being the smallest unit into which speech Our interest in syllabic versus phonemic segmentation has been stimulated and nurtured by our collaboration on cross-linguistic research with Jacques Mehler and Juan Segui. We are very grateful to them for continuing discussion of these issues.

show abstract

Phonemic identification in a phoneme monitoring experiment: The variable role of uncertainty about vowel contexts

Cited by 24 publications

References 13 publications

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Cracking the dual code: toward a unitary model of phoneme identification

The relative accessibility of phonemes and syllables

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