The contribution of prosody to spoken word recognition

The experiment reported here employed a word-onset gating technique to inve stigate the role of prosody in word recognition. Subjects were asked to ide ntify words based on word onsets alone, word onsets followed by information about the word duration, or word onsets followed by information about full word prosody (i.e., both duration and stress). Results showed that words w ere correctly recognized with significantly less segmental onset informatio n when word prosody was available to the subjects. Consistent with this fin ding, prerecognition error responses reflected correct length and prosody w ith less onset phonology when prosody information was provided in the stimu lus than when only length information was provided. The findings of this ex periment confirm the importance of word prosody for spoken word recognition .