Abstract
The question of whether Dutch listeners rely on the rhythmic characteristics of their native language to segment speech was investigated in three experiments. In Experiment 1, listeners were induced to make missegmentations of continuous speech. The results showed that word boundaries were inserted before strong syllables and deleted before weak syllables. In Experiment 2, listeners were required to spot real CVC or CVCC words (C = consonant, V = vowel) embedded in bisyllabic nonsense strings. For CVCC words, fewer errors were made when the second syllable of the nonsense string was weak rather than strong, whereas for CVC words the effect was reversed. Experiment 3 ruled out an acoustic explanation for this effect. It is argued that these results are in line with an account in which both metrical segmentation and lexical competition play a role.
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This research was supported in part by a grant from the Human Frontier of Science Programme “Processing consequences of contrasting language phonologies” and from the Belgian Ministere de l’Education de la Communauté Française (“Action de recherche concertée”—Language processing in different modalities: Comparative approaches). J.V.’s participation in this research was made possible by a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. M.v.Z. was supported by a grant from the Cooperation Center of Tilburg and Eindhoven Universities (SOBU).
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Vroomen, J., Van Zon, M. & de Gelder, B. Cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperceptions and word spotting. Mem Cogn 24, 744–755 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201099
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201099