Beating the bounds: Localized timing cues to word segmentation.
Prosody facilitates perceptual segmentation of the speech stream into a sequence of words and phrases. With regard to speech timing, vowel lengthening is well established as a cue to an upcoming boundary, but listeners' exploitation of consonant lengthening for segmentation has not been systematically tested in the absence of other boundary cues. In a series of artificial language learning experiments, the impact of durational variation in consonants and vowels on listeners' extraction of novel trisyllables was examined. Language streams with systematic lengthening of word-initial consonants were better recalled than both control streams without localized lengthening and streams where word-initial syllable lengthening was confined to the vocalic rhyme. Furthermore, where vowel-consonant sequences were lengthened word-medially, listeners failed to learn the languages effectively. Thus the structural interpretation of lengthening effects depends upon their localization, in this case, a distinction between lengthening of the onset consonant and the vocalic syllable rhyme. This functional division is considered in terms of speech-rate-sensitive predictive mechanisms and listeners' expectations regarding the occurrence of syllable perceptual centres.
School of Psychology, Plymouth University, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom.
Laurence
L
White
Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom.
Sven L
SL
Mattys
School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TU, United Kingdom.
Linda
L
Stefansdottir
School of Psychology, Plymouth University, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom.
Victoria
V
Jones
D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011897:Random Allocation; D013997:Time Factors