Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Two eye-tracking experiments tested (a) whether L2 learners benefit from the consistency of input modality (auditory instead of written processing instruction [PI] training) and (b) whether they benefit from training using the same voice as the test voice. Results confirmed a robust effect of PI training on picture-selection accuracy, yet the…

In perceiving speech, a hearer may divide the utterance into predictable units. In the present investigation of these units, an alleged phenomenon (the resistance of the hearer to perceive extraneous auditory stimuli) was employed. It was argued that this resistance caused the hearer to perceive the irrelevant stimulus, if at all, primarily at the…