The role of vowel phonotactics in native speech segmentation

Abstract Numerous studies have shown that listeners can use phonological cues such as word stress and consonant clusters to find word boundaries in fluent speech. This paper investigates whether they can also use language-specific restrictions on vowel positioning for native speech segmentation. We show that English adults can exploit the fact that typical English words do not end in a lax vowel (e.g. [*diːtʊ]) in order to segment unknown words in a nonsense phrase-picture matching task, in contrast to the null results in prior studies using lexical tasks. However, they only used this cue in quiet listening conditions, and not in the presence of background noise. Thus, like consonant clusters, the lax vowel constraint is vulnerable in adverse listening conditions.

[1]  B. Ooijen.  Vowel mutability and lexical selection in English: Evidence from a word reconstruction task , 1996 .

[2]  Michael Dorman,et al.  The use of fundamental frequency for lexical segmentation in listeners with cochlear implants. , 2009, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[3]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access , 1988 .

[4]  N. Kazanina,et al.  Listeners Use Vowel Harmony and Word-Final Stress to Spot Nonsense Words: A Study of Turkish and French , 2010 .

[5]  Marcela Peña,et al.  ON THE DIFFERENT ROLES OF VOWELS AND CONSONANTS IN SPEECH PROCESSING AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 2003 .

[6]  Sarah C. Creel,et al.  Acquiring an artificial lexicon: Segment type and order information in early lexical entries , 2006 .

[7]  Marina Nespor,et al.  The “Soul” of Language does not use Statistics: Reflections on Vowels and Consonants , 2006, Cortex.

[8]  E. Newport,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article INCIDENTAL LANGUAGE LEARNING: Ustening (and Learning) out of the Comer of Your Ear , 2022 .

[9]  A. Cutler,et al.  Vowel harmony and speech segmentation in Finnish , 1997 .

[10]  J. McQueen.  Segmentation of Continuous Speech Using Phonotactics , 1998 .

[11]  Dennis H. Klatt,et al.  Speech perception: a model of acoustic–phonetic analysis and lexical access , 1979 .

[12]  Boris New,et al.  Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study , 2014 .

[13]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[14]  Sophie K. Scott,et al.  Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: The role of the left inferior frontal gyrus , 2005, Brain and Language.

[15]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants , 2001, Cognition.

[16]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Language-universal constraints on speech segmentation , 2001 .

[17]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Phonotactic and Prosodic Effects on Word Segmentation in Infants , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[19]  Laurence White,et al.  Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: a hierarchical framework. , 2005, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[20]  E. Newport,et al.  Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[21]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[22]  Matthew H. Davis,et al.  Speech recognition in adverse conditions: A review , 2012 .

[23]  E. Newport,et al.  WORD SEGMENTATION : THE ROLE OF DISTRIBUTIONAL CUES , 1996 .

[24]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980 .

[25]  Rochelle S. Newman,et al.  Cues and cue interactions in segmenting words in fluent speech , 2011 .