Phonological processes and the perception of phonotactically illegal consonant clusters.
The perception of consonant clusters that are phonotactically illegal word initially in English (e.g., /tl/,/sr/) was investigated to determine whether listeners' phonological knowledge of the language influences speech processing. Experiment 1 examined whether the phonotactic context effect (Massaro & Cohen, 1983), a bias toward hearing illegal sequences (e.g.,/tl/) as legal (e.g., /tr/), is more likely due to knowledge of the legal phoneme combinations in English or to a frequency effect. In Experiment 2, Experiment 1 was repeated with the clusters occurring word medially to assess whether phonotactic rules of syllabification modulate the phonotactic effect. Experiment 3 examined whether vowel epenthesis, another phonological process, might also affect listeners' perception of illegal sequences as legal by biasing them to hear a vowel between the consonants of the cluster (e.g., /talae/). Results suggest that knowledge of the phonotactically permissible sequences in English can affect phoneme processing in multiple ways.
Ohio State University, Department of Psychology, Columbus 43220, USA. pitt.2@osu.edu
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D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*