How phonological reductions sometimes help the listener.

How phonological reductions sometimes help the listener.

In speech production, high-frequency words are more likely than low-frequency words to be phonologically reduced. We tested in an eye-tracking experiment whether listeners can make use of this correlation between lexical frequency and phonological realization of words. Participants heard prefixed verbs in which the prefix was either fully produced or reduced. Simultaneously, they saw a high-fre...

Hesitation in speech can . . . um . . . help a listener understand

This paper investigates the effect of disfluencies on listeners’ on-line processing of speech. More specifically, it tests the hypothesis that filled pauses like um, which tend to occur before words that are low in accessibility, act as a signal to the listener that a relatively inaccessible word is about to be produced. Two experiments are reported, in which participants followed recorded inst...

Commentary I: skin cancer: clear skies sometimes help.

How Linguistic Chickens Help Spot Spoken-Eggs: Phonological Constraints on Speech Identification

It has long been known that the identification of aural stimuli as speech is context-dependent (Remez et al., 1981). Here, we demonstrate that the discrimination of speech stimuli from their non-speech transforms is further modulated by their linguistic structure. We gauge the effect of phonological structure on discrimination across different manifestations of well-formedness in two distinct l...

How Economical are Phonological Inventories?

Since the work of André Martinet back in the 60’s [7], the notion of ‘economy’ has been accepted as one of the main principles underlying the organization of phonological inventories (hereafter PI). This principle, also named MUAF (‘Maximal Use of Available Features’) by John Ohala [8], states that PI are organized along a few phonetic dimensions that they tend to maximize in terms of number of...