Spoken Word Recognition

“What are word : 8.2, Pre lexical analysis : 8.3, Contact and activation : 8.4 and
Selection : 8.5”

Lecturer: Dr. L. Muhaimi, M.Pd.

Written by:

Name : Septiana Hafifah

NIM : E1D02019

Class : 5 TP 2

Subject: Psycholinguistics Chapter 8

ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM

FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF MATARAM

2022
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this chapter is to present some of what we know about how people recognise
words. The focus will be on the recognition of spoken words, though some of the claims that we will
encounter can be extended to the discussion of visual word recognition in Chapter 9. To provide a
framework for the discussion we will assume that the overall process of spoken word recognition
can be broken down into neat and manageable stages (following Tyler & Frauenfelder, 1987): pre-
lexical analysis - the operations that are carried out on the speech input in order to organise it into
useful units; contact - establishing links between the input and the stored forms of words; activation
- getting contacted words excited about the fact that they have been contacted; access - getting hold
of the infor- mation about a word that is stored in the mental lexicon (e.g. its meaning, grammatical
category, etc.); recognition - knowing which word it is that we have heard. These stages are not
necessarily temporally distinct, and we will see that the processes involved here also interact with
other pro- cesses that contribute to the comprehension of larger stretches of lan- guage (e.g.
sentences). Wider reading will show that there are in fact many models of word recognition and that
the differences between them reflect differences in the detail of the analysis that is argued to take
place at each of these stages, and also in the way in which these stages relate to one another.

8.1 What are words?

One important issue is that the notion of 'word' is different when applied to different
languages (see the example in the sidebar). But even if we gloss over language differ- ences and
reach a tacit agreement that words are what are separated by spaces in printed text (so that in these
parentheses there are nine words). then we still have to face the question of whether cat and cats
are two entirely separate words or two 'versions' of the same word. Or whether foot and feet are
two words. Or whether houseboat is a different word from both house and boat. Or whether ph
one-tree is two words or one. Or whether old is the same word in old news and old friend.
The second issue we need to consider is what 'knowing' a word entails. A distinction can be
drawn between passive and active vocabularies - most speakers can understand more words than
they are likely to use in their own speech. But also there are words that we see and understand in
print, but have never encountered in speech (and occasionally vice versa).
Given these uncertainties about what words are and what it means to know them, it is not
surprising that estimates of the average vocabulary size vary considerably. You will easily find
estimates in the range of 20,000 to 75,000 words. In the Introduction (p. 2) we took an estimate at
the con- servative end, of 20,000 words (Nation, 2006)
8.2 Pre-lexical analysis
Pre-lexical analysis involves automatic peripheral perceptual processes which analyse the
spoken input into linguistically relevant units. These units are then used in the course of word
recognition and in further lan- guage comprehension processes. As we have seen in Chapter 7, the
percep tual cues and processes that we use for these language-related tasks are special, and infants
become selectively attuned to these cues very early on in their lives.

It is widely accepted that the speech input is analysed into phonemes. The phoneme is the
smallest unit that when changed can result in a change in meaning by signalling a different word, as
shown by minimal pairs (see sidebar). Since a difference in one phoneme can signal a differ- ence in
the word in question, it makes sense if the pre-lexical analysis of the speech input has the job of
identifying these word-differentiating units.

But why not let the word be the unit of pre-linguistic analysis, since this is after all the unit
that is to be recognised? There are a number of very good and practical reasons why this would be
ill-advised. To start with, in spoken language it is very often extremely difficult to know where one
word finishes and the next begins - the segmentation problem we saw in Chapter 7. This is reflected
in 'slips of the ear' or misperceptions of speech, which often involve the misplacement of word
boundaries, e.g. when a coke and a là nish is misheard as a coconut Danish (Bond, 1999).

Smaller units of pre-lexical analysis

Alternatives to the phoneme as a pre-lexical unit of analysis include both smaller and larger
units than the phoneme. Amongst the smaller units is the phonetic feature, such as the voicing
feature that distinguishes /p/ and (b) in English. There are many cues to this contrast in voicing, and
it would be possible to break down phonetic features into smaller units of difference, such as the
voice onset time (VOT) considered in Chapter 7 as one perceptual cue to voicing. For illustrative
purposes, however, let us remain at the level of phonetic features, and consider whether it makes
sense to propose a unit of this type as an appropriate unit of pre-lexical analysis proportion of
butter responses than vice versa, presumably because of the phrase bread and butter.

Larger units of pre-lexical analysis

English contrasts strong and weak Pre-lexical units of analysis that are larger than the
phoneme have also been suggested, either instead of or as a supplement to phonemes. Such units
include diphones and syllables, especially stressed syllables. Because diphones include the
transition from one phoneme-sized segment to the next, they encapsulate the variation in
 pronunciation of speech segments that results from the influence of neighbouring sounds. As we
have seen, the /u/ sound in soon is likely to show nasalisation because of the following nasal.
Similarly, the end of this /u/ sound in soon, and also in suit, will have a different quality from the
quality it has in soup, because in the latter case the next consonant involves a lip closure, while in
soon and suit it involves a closure between the tongue and the alveolar ridge (the bony structure
just behind the top teeth).

8.4 Contact and activation

After the prelexical analysis of the speech input, the next stage of the word recognition
process is the contact stage, involving a mapping from the output of pre-lexical analysis onto forms
stored in the mental lexicon. Such mapping from the input to the lexicon is an example of bottom-up
processing. Many models of word recognition argue that this initial con- tact is based solely on
automatic bottom-up processing, while others also claim a role here for top-down processing, eg.
the use of context to pre select words from a particular area of meaning.

The experimental measure of interest is whether the targets show facilitation, i.e. faster
and more accurate responses, after test primes com- pared with after control primes, and whether
this varies depending on how much of a prime has been heard. In an Early condition, the targets
were presented part way through the prime. Le. before the whole prime word had been heard. For a
test prime, this was a point that included all the material which the word shares with its partner
word-for captain/ a tal this would be at the end of the /p/. In the Late condition the targets were
shown at the end of the prime. Facilitation was found in the Early condition for targets related either
to the test prime or to the partner word. So in our example both ms ey and ship would be responded
to more rapidly and with fewer errors after the initial portion of aptain than after the initial portion
of the control word justice. The control target (lamp) showed no such facilitation. In the late
condition, when all of the prime word has been heard, only ship, related to captain, shows
facilitation. The earlier facilitation shown for mn ey has now disappeared.

The Cohort Model

The above result shows that during the early stages of the processing of the spoken word
again, both this word and the phonetically similar word aa tal have been contacted, and words
related to both of these are primed. In other words, the initial contact is with multiple words
matching the input. ie. there is parallel lexical processing. Note that further experi ments with
rhyming word pairs shows that it is the overlap of the initial portion of the word that is important,
and not just any portion of the word. That is, while lee is primed by honey, it is not primed by
money. which has most of the same sounds as honey, but does not start with the same sound. It
makes good sense for the beginning sounds of words to carry primary responsibility for making
contact with words in the mental lexicon, since we hear these parts of the word first. The set of
words con- tacted in this way has been referred to as a word-initial cohort.

8.5 Selection

If multiple word candidates have been contacted on the basis of the initial sounds of an
input word, then some kind of selection process must choose between them so that a word can be
recognised. For each word we can identify a uniqueness point. i.e. a point in the word where it no
longer overlaps with other words in the initial cohort. Dp ending on the speak er's pronunciation, for
at ain (ke p on) this point could be the second vowel sound (/a/), where this word becomes distinct
from aptive (ke p 1v). Theoretical uniqueness points can be determined by searching through
pronunciation-based dictionaries or lexical databases. These can be con- firmed through gating
experiments (see above), which indicate that the actual recognition points of words correlate highly
with these unique- ness points. There has been some debate about the mechanism that results in
the decision that a particular word has been heard.

The significance of the deviation point was first demonstrated in an experiment in which
participants were required to press a response but- ton whenever they heard a nonsense word in a
list of stimulus words. It was found that response times were reasonably constant (at around 450
msec) when measured from the deviation point (Marslen-Wilson, 1980). Other studies, however,
have cast a shadow of doubt over that result, since they have found some variation in the response
times from the deviation point, variation which depends both on the nature of the task that par-
ticipants are doing and also on the word-likeness of the material after the deviation point (Goodman
& Huttenlocher, 1988; Taft & Hambly, 1986). It seems that listeners continue to monitor the input
after the deviation point, so that a more word-like ending, such as a regular affix like -ise or -ic will
slow down the 'no' responses in the lexical decision task. Such continued monitoring of the input is
of practical value in ordinary speech comprehension situations, since we are able to recognise words
even under noisy conditions (e.g. at parties or with machinery operating in the background).