The role of prosody in the mental lexicon

Current models of spoken word recognition take into account factors such as word frequency, word onset cohort size, and phonological neighborhood dens ity. Using the word onset gating technique we tested word recognition when bandpass filtering was used to allow subjects to hear the full prosodic pat tern of a word (number of syllables and syllabic stress), deprived of segme ntal information beyond that contained in the onset gate. Subjects also hea rd either word onsets plus duration information or only word onsets. Result s suggest that word prosody is represented in the mental lexicon and is eff ectively used by listeners in spoken word recognition. (C) 1999 Academic Pr ess.