Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…

Discusses how listeners compensate for coarticulatory influences of one speech sound on another and examines whether lipread information penetrates this perceptual compensation mechanism. Results of three experiments indicate that biasing of the fricative by lipread information and compensation for coarticulation can be dissociated. (Author/VWL)

Examined the combined effects of probabilistic phonotactics and lexical competition by generating words and nonwords that varied orthogonally on phonotactics and similarity neighborhood density. Results from a speeded same-different task revealed simultaneous facilitative effects of phonotactics and inhibitory effects of lexical competition for…

Two phoneme monitoring experiments are reported that examine the amount of lexical activation produced by words containing initial, medial, or final mispronunciations. One showed that minimal mismatches in the initial phoneme produced lexical activation relative to a baseline control nonword, but only when the phoneme was situated at word offset…

Examines possible solutions to the problem of form variation in the perception of speech. Asks whether sentential context can influence the identification of potentially assimilated forms of words. (Author/VWL)

Three experiments were designed to examine the effect on picture naming of the prior production of a word related in phonological form. Findings are consistent with a process of phoneme competition during phonological encoding. (Author/VWL)

Describes the Verbal Transformation Effect (VTE): When listeners hear the same word repeated very many times at a rapid rate, the word tends to be perceived as other words. Reports lexical effects in the VTE and examines their cause. (Author/VWL)

Reviews evidence suggesting that word recognition requires use not only of acoustic-phonetic and lexical information, but also discourse information. Argues there is much variability in causal continuous speech and that there is no simple way to predict or constrain these phonological changes. Suggests one way listeners deal with this variability…

Four experiments were carried out to examine phonological priming effects on bisyllabic target words. In the first two, monosyllabic word and pseudoword primes facilitated lexical decisions to auditorily presented bisyllabic words. The second replicated the initial-overlap effect for monosyllabic word primes using a crossmodal method. In the…

In two experiments, French speakers detected CV or CVC sequences at the beginning of dysyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. In both experiments. latencies were shorter to CV than to CVC targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for CVC-CV than for CV-CV carriers. (Author/VWL)

Argues that phonemes play a central role in speech recognition. Presents simulations showing how the recognition of nonsense syllables can be very well predicted from the recognition of their component phonemes. Suggests that a model in which syllables are factored into their phonemes can account for the results of multidimensional phonetic…

Describes how changes in speaking rate and changes in lexical context have qualitatively different effects on category goodness judgments. A key underlying assumption is that there are prelexical representations that are essentially phonemic in nature. (Author/VWL)

Addresses how phonological regularities of the native language are mastered. Explores consequences of the assumption that the architecture of the speech perception system includes a fast phonological prepossessor that uses language specific prosodic and phonotactic patterns to chunk the speech stream. Shows that as vocabulary size increases, more…

Tests two accounts of the role of gesture in speaking. Specifically, the study seeks to establish whether gesture is involved in the conceptual planning of messages, or whether it is involved only in the generation of the surface forms of utterances. To accomplish this goal, two tasks were developed that elicit comparable utterances but make…

Monitored eye movements of subjects who were following spoken instructions to click on a pictured object with a computer mouse. Subjects were slower to fixate on the target picture when the onset of the target word came from a competitor word than from a nonword as predicted by models of spoken-word recognition that incorporate lexical…