Semantic context effects in the comprehension of reduced pronunciation variants

Marco van de Ven, Benjamin V. Tucker, Mirjam Ernestus

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

31 Scopus citations

Abstract

Listeners require context to understand the highly reduced words that occur in casual speech. The present study reports four auditory lexical decision experiments in which the role of semantic context in the comprehension of reduced versus unreduced speech was investigated. Experiments 1 and 2 showed semantic priming for combinations of unreduced, but not reduced, primes and low-frequency targets. In Experiment 3, we crossed the reduction of the prime with the reduction of the target. Results showed no semantic priming from reduced primes, regardless of the reduction of the targets. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that reduced and unreduced primes facilitate upcoming low-frequency related words equally if the interstimulus interval is extended. These results suggest that semantically related words need more time to be recognized after reduced primes, but once reduced primes have been fully (semantically) processed, these primes can facilitate the recognition of upcoming words as well as do unreduced primes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1301-1316
Number of pages16
JournalMemory and Cognition
Volume39
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Acoustic reduction
  • English
  • Latent semantic analysis
  • Semantic priming
  • Speech perception
  • Word recognition

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

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