Abstract
Recognition of a spoken word phonological variant—schwa vowel deletion (e.g., corporate ? corp’rate)— was investigated in vowel detection (absent/present) and syllable number judgment (two or three syllables) tasks. Variant frequency corpus analyses (Patterson, LoCasto, & Connine, 2003) were used to select words with either high or low schwa vowel deletion rates. Speech continua were created for each word in which schwa vowel length was manipulated (unambiguous schwa-present and schwa-absent endpoints, along with intermediate ambiguous tokens). Matched control nonwords were created with identical schwa vowel continua and surrounding segments. The low-deletion-rate words showed more three-syllable judgments than did the high-deletion-rate words. Matched control nonwords did not differ as a function of deletion rate. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a lexical decision reaction time advantage for more frequent surface forms, as compared with infrequent ones, for schwa-deleted (Experiment 2) and schwa-present (Experiment 3) stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of representations of variant forms of words based on variant frequency.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balota, D. A. (1994). Visual word recognition: The journey from features to meaning. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 303–358). San Diego: Academic Press.
Binder, K. S., & Rayner, K. (1998). Contextual strength does not modulate the subordinate bias effect: Evidence from eye fixations and selfpaced reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 271–276.
Church, B. A., & Schacter, D. L. (1994). Perceptual specificity of auditory priming: Implicit memory for voice intonation and fundamental frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 20, 521–533.
Connine, C. M. (2004). It’s not what you hear but how often you hear it: On the neglected role of phonological variant frequency in auditory word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 1084–1089.
Connine, C. M., & Clifton, C., Jr. (1987). Interactive use of lexical information in speech perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 13, 291–299.
Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1987). Phoneme identification and the lexicon. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 141–177.
Deelman, T., & Connine, C. M. (2001). Missing information in spoken word recognition: Non-released stop consonants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 27, 656–663.
Dilley, L., & Pitt, M. (2007). A study of regressive place assimilation in spontaneous speech and its implications for spoken word recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 122, 2340–2353.
Ernestus, M., Baayen, H., & Schreuder, R. (2002). The recognition of reduced word forms. Brain & Language, 81, 162–173.
Fowler, C., & Housum, J. (1987). Talkers’ signaling of “new” and “old” words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory & Language, 26, 489–504.
Francis, W. N., & Kuĉera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Ganong, W. F. (1980). Phonetic categorization in auditory word perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 6, 110–125.
Godfrey, J. D., Holliman, E. C., & McDaniel, J. (1992). SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. In 1992 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (Vol. 1, pp. 517–520). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Goldinger, S. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review, 105, 251–279.
Gow, D. W., Jr. (2003). Feature parsing: Feature cue mapping in spoken word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 65, 575–590.
Gow, D.W., Jr., & Im, A. M. (2004). A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects. Journal of Memory & Language, 51, 279–296.
Hintzman, D. L. (1986). Schema abstraction in a multiple-trace memory model. Psychological Review, 93, 411–428.
Kemps, R., Ernestus, M., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, H. R. (2004). Processing reduced word forms: The suffix restoration effect. Brain & Language, 90, 117–127.
Kisilevsky, B. S., Hains, S. M. J., Lee, K., Xie, X., Huang, H., Ye, H. H., et al. (2003). Effects of experience on fetal voice recognition. Psychological Science, 14, 220–224.
Lively, S. E., Pisoni, D. B., & Goldinger, S. D. (1994). Spoken word recognition: Research and theory. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 265–302). San Diego: Academic Press.
LoCasto, P. C., & Connine, C. M. (2002). Rule-governed missing information in spoken word recognition: Schwa vowel deletion. Perception & Psychophysics, 64, 208–219.
Lorch, R. F., & Myers, J. L. (1990). Regression analyses of repeated measures data in cognitive research. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 16, 149–157.
Manuel, S. (1992). Recovery of “deleted” schwa. In O. Engstrand & C. Kylander (Eds.), Perilus XIV: Papers from the Symposium on Current Phonetic Research Paradigms for Speech Motor Control (pp. 115–118). Stockholm: University of Stockholm.
McQueen, J. M. (1997). Phonetic categorisation. In F. Grosjean & U. Frauenfelder (Eds.), A guide to spoken word recognition paradigms (pp. 655–664). Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.
Miller, J. L. (2001). Mapping from acoustic signal to phonetic category: Internal structure, context effects and speeded categorization. Language & Cognitive Processes, 16, 683–690.
Mitterer, H., & Blomert, L. (2003). Coping with phonological assimilation in speech perception: Evidence for early compensation. Perception & Psychophysics, 65, 956–969.
Mitterer, H., Csepe, V., Honbolygo, F., & Blomert, I. (2006). The recognition of assimilated word forms does not depend on specific language experience. Cognitive Science, 30, 451–479.
Mitterer, H., & Ernestus, M. (2006). Listeners report /t/s that speakers lenit: Evidence from /t/ lenition in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 73–103.
Mullennix, J. W. (1997). On the nature of perceptual adjustments to voice. In K. A. Johnson & J. W. Mullennix (Eds.), Talker variability and speech processing (pp. 67–83). San Diego: Academic Press.
Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology, 47, 204–238.
Nygaard, L. C., Burt, S. A., & Queen, J. S. (2000). Surface form typicality and asymmetric transfer in episodic memory for spoken words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 26, 1228–1244.
Nygaard, L. C., & Lunders, E. R. (2002). Resolution of lexical ambiguity by emotional tone of voice. Memory & Cognition, 30, 583–593.
Nygaard, L. C., & Pisoni, D. B. (1995). Speech perception: New directions in research and theory. In J. L. Miller & P. D. Eimas (Eds.), Speech, language, and communication (pp. 63–90). San Diego: Academic Press.
Oshika, B., Zue, V. W., Weeks, R. V., Neu, H., & Aurbach, J. (1975). The role of phonological rules in speech understanding research. IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing, ASSP-23, 104–112.
Patterson, D., & Connine, C. M. (2001). A corpus analysis of variant frequency in American English flap production. Phonetica, 58, 254–275.
Patterson, D., LoCasto, P. C., & Connine, C. M. (2003). A corpus analysis of schwa vowel deletion frequency in American English. Phonetica, 60, 45–68.
Pitt, M. A. (1998). Phonological processes and the perception of phonotactically illegal consonant clusters. Perception & Psychophysics, 60, 941–951.
Pitt, M. A., Johnson, K., Hume, E., Kiesling, S., & Raymond, W. (2005). The Buckeye corpus of conversational speech: Labeling conventions and a test of transcriber reliability. Speech Communication, 45, 89–95.
Pitt, M. A., & Samuel, A. G. (1993). An empirical and meta-analytic evaluation of the phoneme identification task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 19, 1–27.
Pollack, I., & Pickett, J. M. (1963). The intelligibility of excerpts from conversation. Language & Speech, 6, 165–171.
Ranbom, L. R., & Connine, C. M. (2007a). Lexical representation of phonological variation. Journal of Memory & Language, 57, 273–298.
Ranbom, L. R., & Connine, C. M. (2007b, November). The role of orthography in spoken word recognition. Paper presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA.
Samuel, A. G. (1981). Phoneme restoration: Insights from a new methodology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 110, 474–494.
Stevens, K. N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sumner, M., & Samuel, A. G. (2005). Perception and representation of regular variation: The case of final /t/. Journal of Memory & Language, 52, 322–338.
van Donselaar, W., Kuijpers, C., & Cutler, A. (1999). Facilitatory effects of vowel epenthesis on word processing in Dutch. Journal of Memory & Language, 41, 59–77.
Zwicky, A. (1972). Note on a phonological hierarchy in English. In R. Stockwell & R. Macaulay (Eds.), Linguistic change and generative theory (pp. 275–301). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The research was supported by NIDCD Grant DC02134.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Connine, C.M., Ranbom, L.J. & Patterson, D.J. Processing variant forms in spoken word recognition: The role of variant frequency. Perception & Psychophysics 70, 403–411 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.3.403
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.3.403