Vowel Harmony and Speech Segmentation in Finnish

Suomi, Kari; McQueen, James M.; Cutler, Anne

doi:10.1006/jmla.1996.2495

Cited by 125 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In other words, the violation informs the sign perceiver that there must be a sign boundary at the point of the violation. This argument is supported by analogous findings in the speech segmentation literature (McQueen, 1998;Suomi et al, 1997) that listeners find spoken words easier to spot when they are aligned with a syllable boundary containing a sequence of segments that would be phonotactically illegal within the syllable or word. Thus, although this particular application of phonotactics is unique to a visual phonologythe constraint concerns restrictions about signs in particular locations-it appears that this tendency reflects a modality-general segmentation procedure.…”

Section: Transitions As Modality-general Cues: Use Of Phonotacticssupporting

confidence: 65%

“…If so, they should be faster to spot real signs when the transition involves moving to a different major location (since there must be a sign boundary at this point) than when the transition involves moving to another subarea within the same major location (which could be a within-sign transition). This would be evidence of another kind of modality-general segmentation procedure, analogous to that demonstrated in speech, where a word is easier to spot when phonotactics require there to be a syllable boundary at the word's edge than when there is no phonotactically necessary boundary (McQueen, 1998;Suomi et al, 1997).…”

Section: Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 93%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

Orfanidou

McQueen

Adam

et al. 2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study asks how users of British Sign Language (BSL) recognize individual signs in connected sign sequences. We examined whether this is achieved through modality-specific or modality-general segmentation procedures. A modality-specific feature of signed languages is that, during continuous signing, there are salient transitions between sign locations. We used the sign-spotting task to ask if and how BSL signers use these transitions in segmentation. A total of 96 real BSL signs were preceded by nonsense signs which were produced in either the target location or another location (with a small or large transition). Half of the transitions were within the same major body area (e.g., head) and half were across body areas (e.g., chest to hand). Deaf adult BSL users (a group of natives and early learners, and a group of late learners) spotted target signs best when there was a minimal transition and worst when there was a large transition. When location changes were present, both groups performed better when transitions were to a different body area than when they were within the same area. These findings suggest that transitions do not provide explicit sign-boundary cues in a modality-specific fashion. Instead, we argue that smaller transitions help recognition in a modality-general way by limiting lexical search to signs within location neighbourhoods, and that transitions across body areas also aid segmentation in a modality-general way, by providing a phonotactic cue to a sign boundary. We propose that sign segmentation is based on modality-general procedures which are core language-processing mechanism

show abstract

Section: Transitions As Modality-general Cues: Use Of Phonotacticssupporting

confidence: 65%

Section: Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

Orfanidou

McQueen

Adam

et al. 2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If a target was misaligned with the fixed stress in a sequence, it was more difficult to spot than if it was aligned. This effect of stress alignment was observed in the wordspotting task, but not in the lexical-decision task (see Suomi et al, 1997, for a similar result in Finnish). It appears that fixed stress may hence affect word segmentation but not word recognition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Possible words and fixed stress in the segmentation of Slovak speech

Hanulíková

McQueen

Mitterer

2010

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The possible-word constraint (PWC; Norris, McQueen, Cutler, & Butterfield, 1997) has been proposed as a language-universal segmentation principle: Lexical candidates are disfavoured if the resulting segmentation of continuous speech leads to vowelless residues in the input-for example, single consonants. Three word-spotting experiments investigated segmentation in Slovak, a language with single-consonant words and fixed stress. In Experiment 1, Slovak listeners detected real words such as ruka "hand" embedded in prepositional-consonant contexts (e.g., /gruka/) faster than those in nonprepositional-consonant contexts (e.g., /truka/) and slowest in syllable contexts (e.g., /dugruka/). The second experiment controlled for effects of stress. Responses were still fastest in prepositional-consonant contexts, but were now slowest in nonprepositional-consonant contexts. In Experiment 3, the lexical and syllabic status of the contexts was manipulated. Responses were again slowest in nonprepositional-consonant contexts but equally fast in prepositional-consonant, prepositional-vowel, and nonprepositional-vowel contexts. These results suggest that Slovak listeners use fixed stress and the PWC to segment speech, but that single consonants that can be words have a special status in Slovak segmentation. Knowledge about what constitutes a phonologically acceptable word in a given language therefore determines whether vowelless stretches of speech are or are not treated as acceptable parts of the lexical parse.

show abstract

“…This may explain why speech in foreign languages often seems unnervingly fast (Pfitzinger and Tamashima, 2006). The difficulty of segmenting foreign speech lies in part in the language-specificity of the procedures by which listeners segment speech into words (Cutler et al, 1983(Cutler et al, , 1986(Cutler et al, , 1989Dumay et al, 2002;Kolinksy et al, 1995;Otake et al, 1993;Suomi et al, 1997). Native listeners efficiently combine the prosodic, phonotactic, and lexical cues and statistical regularities in the language to extract words from speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurophysiological evidence of delayed segmentation in a foreign language

et al. 2007

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous studies have shown that segmentation skills are language-specific, making it difficult to segment continuous speech in an unfamiliar language into its component words.Here we present the first study capturing the delay in segmentation and recognition in the foreign listener using ERPs. We compared the ability of Dutch adults and of English adults without knowledge of Dutch ('foreign listeners') to segment familiarized words from continuous Dutch speech. We used the known effect of repetition on the event-related potential (ERP) as an index of recognition of words in continuous speech. Our results show that word repetitions in isolation are recognized with equivalent facility by native and foreign listeners, but word repetitions in continuous speech are not. First, words familiarized in isolation are recognized faster by native than by foreign listeners when they are repeated in continuous speech. Second, when words that have previously been heard only in a continuous-speech context re-occur in continuous speech, the repetition is detected by native listeners, but is not detected by foreign listeners. A preceding speech context facilitates word recognition for native listeners, but delays or even inhibits word recognition for foreign listeners. We propose that the apparent difference in segmentation rate between native and foreign listeners is grounded in the difference in language-specific skills available to the listeners. Introduction"Parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plaît", "Bitte, sprechen Sie langsamer","Hable más despacio, por favor": Such utterances are the common resource of listeners attempting to understand an unfamiliar language: "Please, speak more slowly". Continuous speech contains no silences between words analogous to the spaces in written text. But while the continuity of spoken utterances is hardly noticeable in the native language, so that we effortlessly interpret each utterance as a sequence of individual words, the process of resolving continuous speech into words is markedly harder in a foreign language. This may explain why speech in foreign languages often seems unnervingly fast (Pfitzinger and Tamashima, 2006). The difficulty of segmenting foreign speech lies in part in the language-specificity of the procedures by which listeners segment speech into words (Cutler et al., 1983(Cutler et al., , 1986(Cutler et al., , 1989Dumay et al., 2002;Kolinksy et al., 1995;Otake et al., 1993; B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 1 7 8 ( 2 0 0 7 ) 1 0 6 -1 1 3 ⁎ Corresponding author.

show abstract

Vowel Harmony and Speech Segmentation in Finnish

Cited by 125 publications

References 7 publications

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

Possible words and fixed stress in the segmentation of Slovak speech

Neurophysiological evidence of delayed segmentation in a foreign language

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About