WORD SPOTTING

The use of the word-spotting task in psycholinguistic research is summ arised. When word spotting, listeners hear a list of nonsense words, s ome of which contain embedded real words. Their task is to detect thos e embedded words. The task was designed to study the segmentation of c ontinuous speech, since it requires listeners to segment the words out of the nonsense contexts. The task has also been used to examine the process of competition between lexical hypotheses during the recogniti on of spoken words. A description of the task, a summary of its advant ages and disadvantages, and references to those studies which have use d the task are provided.