Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

Three phoneme monitoring experiments examined the manner in which additional processing time influences spoken word recognition. Experiment 1a introduced a version of the phoneme monitoring paradigm in which a silent interval is inserted prior to the word-final target phoneme. Phoneme monitoring reaction time decreased as the silent interval…

Investigated three acoustical features of word boundaries between French nouns and adjectives. Found that fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity all appeared to be acoustical correlates of word boundaries. Indicated that the temporal structure of the speech material was the most important cue for the detection of the word boundaries.…

Three lexical decision experiments show that Serbo-Croatian letter-strings are ascribed two phonological readings simultaneously. This phonologic bivalence may impede lexical decision making if the letter-string has a lexical entry in one of the alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic). (RL)

When two Japanese adults named colors written in Kanji, a logographic orthography, and in Kana, a syllabary, the latency to vocalization was consistently less for Kana. This superiority of Kana is attributed to the closer relation of Kana to phonology and, therefore, to speech. (Author/RL)

Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All three employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers. (Author/JL)

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…

Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children' s knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar words was assessed using a visual fixation task. Dutch 19-month-olds were shown pairs of pictures and heard correct…