Sentential and Acoustic Factors in the Recognition of Open- and Closed-Class Words ☆

Abstract Closed-class words are highly frequent yet relatively difficult to perceive; although this ought to impair communication, we communicate easily under normal conditions. Modular and interactive architectures offer differing explanations of this paradox, with different assumptions about how the acoustic and grammatical properties of those words are combined. The interaction of these factors was investigated by having subjects listen for and repeat open- and closed-class homophones (spoken by a male) that were spliced into three female-voice sentences: (a) the same sentence, (b) a neutral sentence, and (c) the “swapped” sentence (e.g., open-target in a closed-class context). Results show that: (a) under neutral conditions, it is harder to identify closed- than open-class tokens; but (b) they differ little in their original contexts; (c) open-class tokens are very easy to identify in a closed-class context; (d) recognizability of closed-class tokens in the swapped context was generally poor; and (e) these interactions are influenced by sentence prosody but not by target length. It is argued that these results indicate a relatively early interaction between perceptual and contextual processing.

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