Ponotactic and Acoustic Cues for Word Segmentation in English

摘要

This study investigates the influence of both phonotactic and acoustic cues on the segmentation of spoken English. Isteners detected embedded English words in nonsense sequences (word spotting). Words aligned with phonotactic boundaries were easier to detect than words without such alignment. Acoustic cues to boundaries could also have signaled word boundaries, especially when word onsets lacked phonotactic alignment. However, only one of several durational boundary cues showed a marginally significant correlation with response times (RTs). The resutls suggest that word segmentation i nEnglish is intluenced primarily by phonotactic constraints and only secondarily by acoustic aspects of the speech signal.