Recognition of spoken words in the continuous speech: effects of transitional probability

Do Cantonese listeners really use phonotactics information in the segmentation process of Cantonese continuous speech? Because some phoneme transitions across Cantonese syllables occur much more often than the others, the transitional probability may cue the locations of possible syllable boundaries in Cantonese speech. Two syllable-spotting experiments were conducted. Results clearly indicated that listeners would find it easier to spot the target syllable in the nonsense sound sequence, which consisted of high transitional probability phoneme combinations than the low transitional probability phoneme combinations across syllables. These results imply that Cantonese listeners are sensitive to the probabilistic phonotactic information across syllable boundaries during spoken language segmentation.