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Phonological variation and word recognition in continuous speech

Xu, Lei
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1190048116

Abstract Details

2007, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
In natural, continuous speech, words are not always produced in the “canonical” way as described in the dictionary. For example, the phrase “right berry” can sound like “ripe berry”. The research question for the current study is: how native listeners resolve the ambiguity quickly. More specifically, how “words” undergo sound changes in connected speech are stored in the mind, and how contextual factors such as prosodic boundary information influence the processing of this kind of ambiguous words. Two eye movement monitoring experiments investigated listeners’ processing of ambiguous words in connected speech. The ambiguities in the experiment stimuli resulted from two types of phonological sound changes in phonetic context - English coronal assimilation and Putonghua Tone2 sandhi. Three different kinds of prosodic boundaries (Prosodic Word Boundary, Intermediate Phrase Boundary, Intonation Phrase Boundary) were inserted in between the critical word and its following context word to elicit different levels of assimilated tokens in natural speech. In each trial of the experiment, the participants’ task was to choose the most appropriate one from four pictures on the computer screen upon hearing a pre-recorded auditory sentence that contains the ambiguous words. The results are most consistent with the proposed modified exemplar processing account, in which both abstract categories such as “word” and “prosodic boundary”, together with each episode of sound change is stored in the listener’s mental lexicon, and are called to act in concert to help with the mapping of the incoming acoustic signal to the word to be retrieved. The results provide new evidence that listeners use prosodic boundary information in a very early stage of lexical processing and that contrastive stress causes a heavier load of processing. They also support previous claims that IP boundaries trigger semantic wrap-up.
Shari Speer (Advisor)
253 p.
Language, Linguistics
psycholinguistics; lexical processing; exemplar model; prosodic boundary; English coronal assimilation; Mandarin tone sandhi

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Xu, L. (2007). Phonological variation and word recognition in continuous speech [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1190048116

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Xu, Lei. Phonological variation and word recognition in continuous speech. 2007. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1190048116.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Xu, Lei. "Phonological variation and word recognition in continuous speech." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1190048116

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1190048116
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© 2007, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.