Semantic context effects in the recognition of acoustically unreduced and reduced words

Marco Van De Ven, Benjamin V. Tucker, Mirjam Ernestus

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Listeners require context to understand the casual pronunciation variants of words that are typical of spontaneous speech [1]. The present study reports two auditory lexical decision experiments, investigating listeners' use of semantic contextual information in the comprehension of unreduced and reduced words. We found a strong semantic priming effect for low frequency unreduced words, whereas there was no such effect for reduced words. Word frequency was facilitatory for all words. These results show that semantic context is relevant especially for the comprehension of unreduced words, which is unexpected given the listener driven explanation of reduction in spontaneous speech.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1867-1870
Number of pages4
JournalProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2009 - Brighton, United Kingdom
Duration: Sep 6 2009Sep 10 2009

Keywords

  • Acoustic reduction
  • Latent semantic analysis
  • Semantics
  • Speech perception
  • Word recognition

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Signal Processing
  • Software
  • Sensory Systems

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