In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjutər] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words. One of the words was phonologically similar to the canonical pronunciation of the target word, one word was similar to the reduced pronunciation, and two words served as unrelated distractors. When spoken targets were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and in sentential contexts (Experiment 2), competition was modulated as a function of the target word form. When reduced targets were presented in sentential contexts, listeners were probabilistically more likely to first fixate reduced-form competitors before shifting their eye gaze to canonical-form competitors. Experiment 3, in which the original /p/ from [pjutər] was replaced with a “real” onset /p/, showed an effect of cross-splicing in the late time window. We conjecture that these results fit best with the notion that speech reductions initially activate competitors that are similar to the phonological surface form of the reduction, but that listeners nevertheless can exploit fine phonetic detail to reconstruct strongly reduced forms to their canonical counterparts.
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机译：在听众的日常交流中，他们通常会听到随便的演讲，而这些话通常是用较少的片段产生的，而不是大多数心理语言实验所用的认真的演讲。三个实验使用视觉世界范式的无目标变体，在识别简化形式（例如[pjutər]）用于计算机的过程中检查了语音竞争。当听众观看四个印刷字样的显示时，他们会在听见规范和简化形式后跟踪听众的眼睛运动。其中一个单词在语音上与目标单词的标准发音相似，一个单词与简化后的发音相似，而两个单词则成为无关的干扰词。当口语目标被孤立地呈现（实验1）和句子上下文（实验2）时，竞争被调制为目标单词形式的函数。当在句子情境中提出降低的目标时，听众更有可能先将简化形式的竞争者固定下来，然后再将目光转向规范形式的竞争者。实验3中，[pjutər]的原始/ p /被“真实”发作/ p /代替，显示了在较晚的时间窗口中交叉拼接的效果。我们推测，这些结果最符合以下观点：语音还原最初会激活与还原的语音表面形式相似的竞争者，但听众仍可以利用精细的语音细节来将其还原形式简化为规范的对应形式。
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