The Nature of Phoneme Representation in Spoken Word Recognition

Four experiments used the psychological refractory period logic to examine whether integration of multiple sources of phonemic information has a decisional locus. All experiments made use of a dual-task paradigm in which participants made forced-choice color categorization (Task 1) and phoneme categ...

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Published inJournal of experimental psychology. General Vol. 137; no. 2; pp. 282 - 302
Main Authors Gaskell, M. Gareth, Quinlan, Philip T, Tamminen, Jakke, Cleland, Alexandra A
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States American Psychological Association 01.05.2008
Subjects
Adult
Choice Behavior
Classification
Color Perception
Cues
Decision Making
Experimental Psychology
Female
Figurative Language
Humans
Male
Oral Language
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Patterned Responses
Phonemes
Phonetics
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Reaction Time
Reading
Refractory Period, Psychological
Simulation
Speech Perception
Task Analysis
Word Recognition
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Summary:Four experiments used the psychological refractory period logic to examine whether integration of multiple sources of phonemic information has a decisional locus. All experiments made use of a dual-task paradigm in which participants made forced-choice color categorization (Task 1) and phoneme categorization (Task 2) decisions at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. In Experiment 1, Task 2 difficulty was manipulated using words containing matching or mismatching coarticulatory cues to the final consonant. The results showed that difficulty and onset asynchrony combined in an underadditive way, suggesting that the phonemic mismatch was resolved prior to a central decisional bottleneck. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 using nonwords. In Experiment 3, the manipulation of task difficulty involved lexical status, which once again revealed an underadditive pattern of response times. Finally, Experiment 4 compared this prebottleneck variable with a decisional variable: response key bias. The latter showed an additive pattern of responses. The experiments show that resolution of phonemic ambiguity can take advantage of cognitive slack time at short asynchronies, indicating that phonemic integration takes place at a relatively early stage of spoken word recognition. Appended are: (1) Words Used in Experiment 1 and Nonwords Used in Experiment 2; and (2) TRACE Simulations. (Contains 4 tables and 7 figures.)
ISSN:0096-3445
DOI:10.1037/0096-3445.137.2.282