Accounting for Speech Rate in Spoken Word Recognition

To test whether speech rate influences the interpretation of lexically-ambiguous forms, we conducted a visual-world eyetracking study. We varied the speech rate of carrier phrases, to see if this influences how listeners perceive sequences with a coronal/labial ambiguity. Our results suggest that listeners’ interpretations are sensitive to speech rate: Even with identical acoustic materials, listeners’ real-time processing of ambiguous words is influenced by the speech rate of the surrounding carrier sentence. This work highlights the importance of incorporating speech rate into existing models of spoken word recognition.