The effects of syllable boundary and context on word recognition in Korean continuous speech

Abstract

We examined resyllabification cost in spoken word recognition in Korean and found an interaction between syllable boundary and context at the lexical level. Experiment 1 compared a misalignment condition and an alignment condition. The misalignment condition involves the word-final consonant merging with the onset of the next syllable. The alignment condition involves word-vowel match with syllable boundary. Experiment 1, in the word spotting task, showed faster and more accurate word recognition in the alignment than in the misalignment condition. Experiment 2 was conducted to investigate the effects of the syllable boundary as well as context on word recognition. Four types of target stimuli were created: target related-aligned, target related-misaligned, target neutral-aligned, and target neutral-misaligned. Experiment 2, auditory lexical decision task, showed an interaction between syllable boundary and context variables. Thus, we confirmed the syllable's role as a segmentation unit. Furthermore, the context and the syllable boundary significantly affected word recognition at the lexical level together.

The Interplay of Syllable Structure and Consonant Sonority in L2 Speech Segmentation

“…Syllabic effects in lexical segmentation emerged not only in studies using monitoring tasks but also in studies using word-spotting tasks (Dumay et al 2002;Kang and Nam 2014;Garrido-Pozú 2023), cross-modal priming tasks (Tabossi et al 2000;Tagliapietra et al 2009), and syllable-reversal and partial-repetition tasks (Content et al 2001). Effects of syllable structure are not restricted to lexical segmentation only.…”