S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Friday Evening Posters 3023–3029
mary experiment used cohort pairs (windmill/window), familiarizing
only one member in a given voice. Then eye movements were monitored
while subjects identified words from a screen containing target,
cohort, and unrelated pictures. When hearing the familiar voice, normalization
models predict heightened early activation for target and
cohort, since experience with wind- applies to both. Episodic models
predict bias only to words previously heard. The fixations roughly followed
an episodic pattern, but only after the disambiguation point (/m/
in windmill). Thus, unlike both models, indexical information may facilitate
perception of sublexical units (not words).
(3023)
Prosodic Influences on Segmental Context Effects: An Analysis of
Neural Dynamics. DAVID W. GOW, JR. & JENNIFER A. SEGAWA,
Massachusetts General Hospital—The structure of spoken language
is organized around a hierarchy of units ranging from feature cues to
words, phrases, sentences, and discourses. Gow’s (2003) feature cue
parsing theory suggests that perceptual grouping or unitization
processes produce progressive and regressive perceptual context effects
in the perception of assimilated speech. In the present work, we
explore the role of higher order prosodic boundaries in this unitization
process. We examined the neural dynamics that produce or block
assimilation context effects, using a multimodal imaging strategy involving
fMRI, MEG, EEG, and anatomical MRI data and analyses of
gamma phase locking and Granger causation. These analysis tools allowed
us to identify activation dependencies between ROIs making up
a large distributed cell assembly responsible for different elements of
spoken language processing. The results are discussed in the context
of the general problems of unitization and the integration of multiple
representations in speech perception.
(3024)
The Role of Orthography in Spoken Word Recognition. LARISSA J.
RANBOM & CYNTHIA M. CONNINE, Binghamton University (sponsored
by Cynthia M. Connine)—Two experiments investigated the role
of orthography in the representation and processing of spoken words.
The experiments capitalized on English spelling conventions, which
can include letters that are not pronounced in the spoken form (i.e.,
the t in castle). Processing of silent-letter words pronounced with and
without the silent letter (e.g., castle pronounced with or without a /t/)
was compared with control words with no silent letter (e.g., hassle
pronounced with or without a /t/). In Experiment 1, a same/different
task for words pronounced correctly or with the inserted phoneme
showed greater confusability for the silent-letter words (e.g., when the
inserted phoneme matched the orthography) than for the controls. In
Experiment 2, equivalent priming effects were found for the correct
and segment-added pronunciation only for silent-letter words. We
suggest that phonological representations computed from an orthographic
form are represented in the lexicon and are active during spoken
word recognition.
(3025)
Years of Exposure to English Predicts Perception and Production of
/r/ and /l/ by Native Speakers of Japanese. ERIN M. INGVALSON,
Carnegie Mellon University, JAMES L. MCCLELLAND, Stanford
University, & LORI L. HOLT, Carnegie Mellon University—Length
of residency (LOR) in a second language (L2) environment is a reliable
predictor of overall L2 proficiency. We examined whether LOR
in an English-speaking society would predict native Japanese (NJ)
speakers’ proficiency with English /r/ and /l/, notoriously difficult
sounds for NJ speakers. NJ participants with under 2, 2–5, or
10+ years of residency were assessed on perception and production of
/r/ and /l/ plus other proficiency and exposure variables. Of interest
was onset frequency of the third formant (F3), the most reliable cue
differentiating English /r/ and /l/ but one that is very difficult for native
Japanese. Longer LOR was associated with greater reliance on
F3, and F3 weighting was correlated with rated English-like production.
Reliance on F3 approached native levels for some in the longest
90
LOR group, suggesting that adult plasticity extends to some of the
most difficult aspects of L2 proficiency.
(3026)
Apparent Lexical Compensation for Coarticulation Effects Are
Due to Experimentally Induced Biases. ALEXANDRA JESSE &
JAMES M. MCQUEEN, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
& DENNIS NORRIS, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit—An
empirical pillar of the interactive view of speech perception (Mc-
Clelland et al., 2006) is the evidence of apparent top-down influence
of lexical knowledge on compensation for coarticulation. Magnuson
et al. (2003), for example, showed that lexical knowledge about an
ambiguous fricative (“sh” not “s” forms a word in “bru?”) appeared
to change perception of a following ambiguous plosive (more “t” responses
in “bru?-?apes”), like hearing an unambiguous fricative
would. A series of phonetic-categorization experiments with the
Magnuson et al. materials show that their result was due to experimentally
induced response biases rather than lexical knowledge. The
direction of the effect varied as a function of the probability of word
(bliss/brush) and nonword (blish/bruss) trials during practice. With
these probabilities equated, no lexical compensation for coarticulation
effect was found. These findings suggest that speech perception
is not interactive, and that listeners are sensitive to biases created by
only 16 practice trials.
(3027)
Gradient Sensitivity to Continuous Acoustic Detail: Avoiding the
Lexical Garden-Path. BOB MCMURRAY, University of Iowa, &
RICHARD N. ASLIN & MICHAEL K. TANENHAUS, University of
Rochester (sponsored by Richard N. Aslin)—Spoken word recognition
is gradiently sensitive to cues like voice onset time (VOT; McMurray,
Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2002). We ask how long such detail is retained
and whether it facilitates recognition. A lexical garden-path paradigm
used pairs such as barricade/parakeet. If voicing were ambiguous, the
system must wait considerable time to identify the referent. VOT was
varied from the target (barricade) to a garden-path inducing nonword
(parricade). If VOT is retained, it could facilitate reactivation at the
point-of-disambiguation (POD). However, if it was lost, there should
be no effect of VOT on disambiguation. Using eyetracking, we examined
cases where listeners overtly committed (fixated) the competitor
prior to the POD. Recovery time was linearly related to VOT.
This replicated when the screen did not contain the competitor. Thus,
sensitivity to continuous acoustic detail persists and can facilitate online
recognition. TRACE can only model this under restricted parameter
sets, suggesting important constraints on this model.
(3028)
Word Segmentation in the “Real World” of Conversational Speech.
JOSEPH D. W. STEPHENS & MARK A. PITT, Ohio State University—
Language comprehension requires segmentation of continuous speech
into discrete words. An understanding of the problems faced by the
perceptual system during segmentation can be gained from analyses
of corpora of spontaneous speech. Analyses of phonetic transcriptions
of the Buckeye Corpus were used to define the problem in detail. The
results revealed that in some high-frequency environments (e.g., following
schwa), acoustic and phonetic information was ambiguous in
the location of word boundaries. Experiments were then performed to
investigate how listeners resolve these ambiguities. In line with the
work of Mattys et al. (2005), the results suggest that contextual information
drives segmentation because strong acoustic cues to word
boundaries are often absent.
(3029)
Effects of Nonspeech Contexts on Speech Categorization: A Critical
Examination. NAVIN VISWANATHAN, JAMES S. MAGNUSON, &
CAROL A. FOWLER, University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories—On
the general auditory account of speech perception, compensation
for coarticulation results from spectral contrast rather than