Distal rhythm influences whether or not listeners hear a word in continuous speech: support for a perceptual grouping hypothesis.
Due to extensive variability in the phonetic realizations of words, there may be few or no proximal spectro-temporal cues that identify a word's onset or even its presence. Dilley and Pitt (2010) showed that the rate of context speech, distal from a to-be-recognized word, can have a sizeable effect on whether or not a word is perceived. This investigation considered whether there is a distinct role for distal rhythm in the disappearing word effect. Listeners heard sentences that had a grammatical interpretation with or without a critical function word (FW) and transcribed what they heard (e.g., are in Jill got quite mad when she heard there are birds can be removed and Jill got quite mad when she heard their birds is still grammatical). Consistent with a perceptual grouping hypothesis, participants were more likely to report critical FWs when distal rhythm (repeating ternary or binary pitch patterns) matched the rhythm in the FW-containing region than when it did not. Notably, effects of distal rhythm and distal rate were additive. Results demonstrate a novel effect of distal rhythm on the amount of lexical material listeners hear, highlighting the importance of distal timing information and providing new constraints for models of spoken word recognition.
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Oyer Center, 1026 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States; Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States. Electronic address: tmorrill@msu.edu.
Tuuli H
TH
Morrill
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Oyer Center, 1026 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States; Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States.
Laura C
LC
Dilley
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States.
J Devin
JD
McAuley
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 201 Psychology Building, 1835 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, United States.
Mark A
MA
Pitt
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
Perceptual grouping; Rhythm; Speech rate; Word recognition; Word segmentation