Abstract
Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the role of suprasegmental information in the processing of spoken words. All primes consisted of truncated spoken Dutch words. Recognition of visually presented word targets was facilitated by prior auditory presentation of the first two syllables of the same words as primes, but only if they were appropriately stressed (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by okTO-); inappropriate stress, compatible with another word (e.g., OKTOBER preceded by OCto-, the beginning of octopus), produced inhibition. Monosyllabic fragments (e.g., OC-) also produced facilitation when appropriately stressed; if inappropriately stressed, they produced neither facilitation nor inhibition. The bisyllabic fragments that were compatible with only one word produced facilitation to semantically associated words, but inappropriate stress caused no inhibition of associates. The results are explained within a model of spoken-word recognition involving competition between simultaneously activated phonological representations followed by activation of separate conceptual representations for strongly supported lexical candidates; at the level of the phonological representations, activation is modulated by both segmental and suprasegmental information.
Acknowledgments
Experiment 1 was previously reported to the 134th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, San Diego, CA. We thank Tau van Dijck, Maarten Jansonius, Jessica Pass, Peter van de Pol, Mark Scholten, Michiel Seevinck, Keren Shatzman, and Marlies Wassenaar for technical assistance, and Delphine Dahan and James McQueen for helpful comments and advice. WvD is now with The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); email address [email protected]
Notes
Upper case on part of a word will be used to signify primary stress location. Words entirely in upper case are the visual target words in the priming experiments.
In the second half of Experiment 1, the condition RT and error means were 480/1% (stress-matching prime), 521/3% (stress-mismatching prime), and 525/3% (control prime).
In the second half of Experiment 2, the condition means were 496 ms/4.3% error (stress-matching prime), 493 ms/3.2% error (stress-mismatching prime), and 513 ms/4.7% error (control prime).