Two eye-tracking experiments tested how pitch prominence on a prenominal adjective affects contrast resolution in Japanese adult and 6-year old listeners. Participants located two animals in succession on displays with multiple colored animals. In Experiment 1, adults' fixations to the contrastive target (pink cat [right arrow] GREEN cat) were…

We used eyetracking to examine how tonal versus segmental information influence spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. Participants heard an auditory word and were required to identify its corresponding picture from an array that included the target item ("chuang2" "bed"), a phonological competitor (segmental: chuang1 "window"; cohort:…

The lexical bias effect (the tendency for phonological speech errors to create words more often than nonwords) has been debated for over 30 years. One account attributes the effect to a lexical editor, a strategic component of the production system that examines each planned phonological string, and suppresses it if it is a nonword. The…

In a regression study of conversational speech, we show that frequency, contextual predictability, and repetition have separate contributions to word duration, despite their substantial correlations. We also found that content- and function-word durations are affected differently by their frequency and predictability. Content words are shorter…

Four experiments in written and spoken dialogue tested the predictions of two distinct accounts of syntactic encoding in sentence production: a lexicalist, residual activation account and an implicit-learning account. Experiments 1 and 2 showed syntactic priming (i.e., the tendency to reuse the syntactic structure of a prime sentence in the…

One account of how pronunciation variants of spoken words (center-> "senner" or "sennah") are recognized is that sublexical processes use information about variation in the same phonological environments to recover the intended segments [Gaskell, G., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1998). Mechanisms of phonological inference in speech perception.…

Many theoretical models of reading assume that different writing systems require different processing assumptions. For example, it is often claimed that print-to-sound mappings in Chinese are not represented or processed sub-lexically. We present a connectionist model that learns the print-to-sound mappings of Chinese characters using the same…

Time course estimates from eye tracking during spoken language processing (the "visual world paradigm", or VWP) have enabled progress on debates regarding fine-grained details of activation and competition over time. There are, however, three gaps in current analyses of VWP data: consideration of time in a statistically rigorous manner,…

Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

Language-specific phonological processes routinely affect the pronunciation of words spoken in context, but do not appear to interfere with spoken word recognition. Five experiments are presented in which native and non-speakers of Hungarian and Korean monitored for segments in assimilated and non-assimilated control contexts related to…

Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name ("pencil," given target "panda") than on less confusable distractors…