Lexical manipulation as a discovery tool for psycholinguistic research

Consultation of machine-readable dictionaries has advanced understanding of language processing; but these resources also allow examination of processing consequences if the lexicon changes. To recognise speech, listeners must rapidly evaluate spoken input as matching or mismatching candidate words. Listeners use any speech cues that help this process, whereby identical cues across languages may be used in one language but not in another. Suprasegmental stress cues, for example, are similar in Dutch and English, but used only in Dutch. This asymmetry has been explained as due to vowel reduction in English; lexical manipulation here tests this proposal and suggests a refinement.

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