Beating the bounds: Localized timing cues to word segmentation

TY - JOUR

T1 - Beating the bounds

T2 - Localized timing cues to word segmentation

AU - White, Laurence

AU - Mattys, Sven

AU - Stefansdottir, Linda

AU - Jones, Victoria

N1 - (c) 2015 The Authors. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.

PY - 2015/8/28

Y1 - 2015/8/28

N2 - 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 whole 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.

AB - 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 whole 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.

U2 - 10.1121/1.4927409

DO - 10.1121/1.4927409

M3 - Article

SN - 0001-4966

VL - 138

SP - 1214

EP - 1220

JO - Acoustical Society of America. Journal

JF - Acoustical Society of America. Journal

IS - 2

ER -