COMPETITION AND SEGMENTATION IN SPOKEN-WORD RECOGNITION

Spoken utterances contain few reliable cues to word boundaries, but li steners nonetheless experience little difficulty identifying words in continuous speech. The authors present data and simulations that sugge st that this ability is best accounted for by a model of spoken-word r ecognition combining competition between alternative lexical candidate s and sensitivity to prosodic structure. In a word-spotting experiment , stress pattern effects emerged most clearly when there were many com peting lexical candidates for part of the input. Thus, competition bet ween simultaneously active word candidates can modulate the size of pr osodic effects, which suggests that spoken-word recognition must be se nsitive both to prosodic structure and to the effects of competition. A version of the Shortlist model (D. G. Norris, 1994b) incorporating t he Metrical Segmentation Strategy (A. Cutler & D. Norris, 1988) accura tely simulates the results using a lexicon of more than 25,000 words.