Speech reductions change the dynamics of competition during spoken word recognition

Abstract

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated how phonological reductions (e.g., “puter” for “computer”) modulate phonological competition. Participants listened to sentences extracted from a spontaneous speech corpus and saw four printed words: a target (e.g., “computer”), a competitor similar to the canonical form (e.g., “companion”), one similar to the reduced form (e.g., “pupil”), and an unrelated distractor. In Experiment 1, we presented canonical and reduced forms in a syllabic and in a sentence context. Listeners directed their attention to a similar degree to both competitors independent of the target's spoken form. In Experiment 2, we excluded reduced forms and presented canonical forms only. In such a listening situation, participants showed a clear preference for the “canonical form” competitor. In Experiment 3, we presented canonical forms intermixed with reduced forms in a sentence context and replicated the competition pattern of Experiment 1. These data suggest that listeners penalize acoustic mismatches less strongly when listening to reduced speech than when listening to fully articulated speech. We conclude that flexibility to adjust to speech-intrinsic factors is a key feature of the spoken word recognition system.

Keywords:

• Spoken word recognition
• Reduced forms
• Eye tracking
• Dutch

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Mirjam Ernestus, Natasha Warner, and James McQueen for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹Clearly, other contrasts may be of interest, too. For instance, if the competitors are different overall from the distractors, one might wonder if this difference could be driven by one of the competitors. One might then compare each competitor individually with the distractor. There are two reasons not to do this. Firstly, this would generate linearly dependent contrasts and the necessary correction of the statistical tests would reduce the statistical power. Secondly, if only one of the competitors gives rise to competition effects, this should lead to a significant difference between the two competitors. Hence, with the two contrasts—competitors versus distractor and “canonical form” competitor versus “reduced form” competitor—we ascertain whether there are measurable competition effects at all and whether they are mainly carried by one of the competitors.