Can hearing puter activate pupil? Phonological competition and the processing of reduced spoken words in spontaneous conversations

Abstract

In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjutər] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words. One of the words was phonologically similar to the canonical pronunciation of the target word, one word was similar to the reduced pronunciation, and two words served as unrelated distractors. When spoken targets were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and in sentential contexts (Experiment 2), competition was modulated as a function of the target word form. When reduced targets were presented in sentential contexts, listeners were probabilistically more likely to first fixate reduced-form competitors before shifting their eye gaze to canonical-form competitors. Experiment 3, in which the original /p/ from [pjutər] was replaced with a “real” onset /p/, showed an effect of cross-splicing in the late time window. We conjecture that these results fit best with the notion that speech reductions initially activate competitors that are similar to the phonological surface form of the reduction, but that listeners nevertheless can exploit fine phonetic detail to reconstruct strongly reduced forms to their canonical counterparts.

Keywords:

• Spoken word recognition
• Reduced forms
• Lexical competition
• Eye tracking

Notes

¹ For clarity, all translations are in single quotation marks.

² Note, however, that eye movement behaviour in both versions reflects complex mapping processes between spoken words and printed words/pictures. Past research (see Huettig, Mishra, & Olivers, 2012, for detailed discussion) has shown that with picture displays, fixations can be determined by matches between knowledge retrieved on the basis of information in the linguistic and in the visual input at phonological, semantic, and visual levels of representation. With printed word displays, fixations are determined by online matches at phonological, semantic, and orthographic levels. The exact dynamics of the representational level at which such mapping occurs however is codetermined by the timing of cascaded processing in the spoken word and object/visual word recognition systems, by the temporal unfolding of the spoken language, and by the nature of the visual environment (e.g., which other representational matches are present).

³ Note that it is problematic to do controlled acoustic measurements on the “surface” and the “intended” segments. Obviously, it is possible to do measurements, but there is a need for good control tokens. All segments come out of different contexts; therefore, any obtained measure depends on different speakers, different prosodies, and different quality of the sounds. Most of the sentences contain quite some noise, which also prevented us from doing good controlled measurements on the segments.

⁴ We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.