THE POSSIBLE-WORD CONSTRAINT IN THE SEGMENTATION OF CONTINUOUS SPEECH

We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to co nstraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This P ossible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which co uld not be a word - for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spot ting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detect apple, for example, in fapple (where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than in vuffapple (where vuff could be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model o f continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of com petition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementatio n accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation. (C) 1997 Academic Press.