The temporal organization of speech and the process of spoken-word recognition

Timing patterns in speech show a number of regularities which have been established many times for many different languages, such as the shorter average duration and greater durational variability of unstressed as compared to stressed syllables, the decrease of syllable duration with increasing word length, anticipatory shortening of syllables in words and phrases, prepausal lengthening, and the decrease of word duration with increasing contextual redundancy. An attempt will be made to account for such regularities starting from the general assumption that speed and accuracy of articulatory movement in coherent phrases are continuously adapted to what the listener needs at each moment in time. Against this background important aspects of timing patterns in speech can be meaningfully related to properties of the process of spoken word recognition. Words are often recognized before they have been heard completely. The moment in time that a word is recognized depends on its lexical redundancy, frequency of o...