The open-/closed-class distinction in spoken-word recognition

Incoming continuous speech needs to be segmented into words before it can be understood, a process which is based on the individual characteristics of a language. After a brief presentation of the realization of segmentation in the model of spoken-word recognition Shortlist (Norris, 1994), this chapter discusses how a processing distinction between the open-class vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and the closed-class vocabulary (e.g., articles and pronouns) could be of use in the segmentation of Dutch. This discussion will be followed by a short review of experimental evidence for two distinct processing vocabularies, and leads to the formulation of three research questions: 1) what is the role of word frequency in the recognition of openand closed-class words, 2) is stress an indicator of vocabulary class in Dutch and are Dutch listeners able to use this cue in the segmentation of continuous speech, and 3) are listeners able to use the syntactic context of a sentence to predict upcoming closed-class words? The introduction ends with an overview of the contents of the other chapters.