Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> The process of spoken-word recognition <s> Abstract Lexical access takes place when sensory information is matched to lexical information. The nature of the code in which this match takes place was examined in two experiments. The first experiment looked at auditory lexical processing and found that nonwords took longer to classify as nonwords if they formed the beginnings of real words, regardless of syllable structure. This was in contrast to a second experiment which employed a visual lexical decision task, where nonwords took longer to classify only if they formed the first syllable of a word. It was concluded that the access code that activates lexical information in spoken word recognition is the first few phonemes regardless of syllable structure, whereas in printed word recognition the access code is the first (orthographically defined) syllable. <s> BIB001 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> The process of spoken-word recognition <s> Abstract Models of word recognition differ with respect to where the effects of sentential-semantic context are to be located. Using a crossmodal priming technique, this research investigated the availability of lexical entries as a function of stimulus information and contextual constraint. To investigate the exact locus of the effects of sentential contexts, probes that were associatively related to contextually appropriate and inappropriate words were presented at various positions before and concurrent with the spoken word. The results show that sentential contexts do not preselect a set of contextually appropriate words before any sensory information about the spoken word is available. Moreover, during lexical access, defined here as the initial contact with lexical entries and their semantic and syntactic properties, both contextually appropriate and inappropriate words are activated. Contextually effects are located after lexical access, at a point in time during word processing where the sensory input by itself is still insufficiently informative to disambiguate between the activated entries. This suggests that sentential-semantic contexts have their effects during the process of selecting one of the activated candidates for recognition. <s> BIB002 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> The process of spoken-word recognition <s> Three experiments and a simulation study investigate competing featural and phonemic views of the representation of the speech input in access to the mental lexicon. Auditory lexical decision and gating tasks show that the processing consequences of subcategorical mismatches (conflicts between phonetic cues to speech segment identity) depend on the lexical status of the conflicting cues, such that conflicts that only involve nonwords do not disrupt performance. A further study, using a phonetic-decision task with the same stimuli, found the same pattern. A simulation study shows that the interactive activation model TRACE, with top-down feedback to a prelexical phonemic level, does not model these effects successfully. The authors argue instead for a direct access featural model, based on a distributed computational substrate, where featural information is mapped directly onto lexical representations. <s> BIB003 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> The process of spoken-word recognition <s> In a series of experiments, listeners heard words and nonwords, some cross-spliced so that they contained acoustic-phonetic mismatches. Performance was worse on mismatching than on matching items. Words cross-spliced with words and words cross-spliced with nonwords produced parallel results. But in lexical decision and one of three phonetic decision experiments, performance on nonwords cross-spliced with words was poorer than on nonwords cross-spliced with nonwords. A gating study confirmed that there were misleading coarticulatory cues in the cross-spliced items; a final experiment showed that the earlier results were not due to inter-item differences in the strength of these cues. Three models of phonetic decision-making (the Race model, TRACE, and a postlexical model) are all unable to explain the data. We outline a new bottom-up model which accounts for the findings in terms of lexical involvement at a dedicated decision-making stage. <s> BIB004 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> The process of spoken-word recognition <s> Four cross-modal priming experiments in Spanish addressed the role of suprasegmental and segmental information in the activation of spoken words. Listeners heard neutral sentences ending with word fragments (e.g., princi-) and made lexical decisions on letter strings presented at fragment offset. Responses were compared for fragment primes that fully matched the spoken form of the initial portion of target words, versus primes that mismatched in a single element (stress pattern; one vowel; one consonant), versus control primes. Fully matching primes always facilitated lexical decision responses, in comparison to the control condition, while mismatching primes always produced inhibition. The respective strength of the contribution of stress, vowel, and consonant (one feature mismatch or more) information did not differ statistically. The results support a model of spoken-word recognition involving automatic activation of word forms and competition between activated words, in which the activation process is sensitive to all acoustic information relevant to the language's phonology. <s> BIB005
The stored representations that listeners hold in memory, and against which incoming speech needs to be matched, are in most cases representations of words; some recurring phrases and useful productive affixes apart, words form the core of the recognition process. Across languages, what counts as a word can differ widely, and the number of processes affecting a word's actual form in speech can vary too; but in all languages the words in speech are variable in their form, are continuously appended to other words, and overlap in form with other possible words in the vocabulary. Listeners do not wait for the resulting ambiguity to be resolved. Potential interpretations of the incoming input are considered simultaneously, and additional input immediately evaluated with respect to its import for the candidate set. This makes word recognition effectively a process in which rival lexical alternatives compete, in that evidence in favour of any one of them simultaneously counts against all rival candidates. If listeners hear a nonword which might have continued to become a word, they take longer to reject it than if it could not have become a word (e.g., driz, which might have become drizzle, is harder than drim; BIB001 . This is even true if the cue to a word is in the way sounds are articulated; so troot made up of troo-from troop plus /t/ is harder to reject than troot made up of troo-from trook plus /t/ BIB003 BIB004 . The real words drizzle and troop were competing and so causing the longer response times; in the latter case, even tiny cues in the vowel of troo-, suggesting an upcoming bilabial sound, were apparently enough to favour an available real-word candidate. When only a fragment has been heard, alternative continuations of it are equally available BIB002 ), but as soon as one of the alternatives is mismatched by the input, its probability of acceptance is reduced BIB005 . Many experiments examining this effect, including these two, have used a task in which listen-ers hear speech but make a response about a visually presented word. This task ("cross-modal priming") exploits the fact that responses to a word are always faster on a second presentation. This includes responses to a visually presented word being faster after auditory presentation of the same word, or part of it, compared with after presentation of some unrelated word or fragment. Thus if visually presented CAPTAIN and CAPTIVE are both recognised faster after capt-has been heard, we assume that both were made available by the spoken fragment. And if the fragment sardi-makes responses to SARDINA 'sardine' similarly faster, while responses to SARDANA 'a dance' after sardi-are actually slower than after the unrelated control fragment, we assume that the second vowel in the fragment has added matching evidence to the probability of SARDINA, but has significantly reduced the probability of SARDANA by mismatching it. Soto-Faraco et al. found that any such mismatching evidence was immediately exploited by listeners, and it did not matter whether the mismatch came from a vowel or a consonant, or from stress pattern, or from a single phonetic feature (e.g., the place of articulation difference between /m/ and /n/) or many features (e.g., the difference between /p/ and /s/); anything which distinguished between rival word candidates was used right away to favour the winner and disfavour the alternatives. This result makes very clear what the role of phonemes is in spoken-word recognition; although the distinction between any word and its nearest rivaltroop rather than troot, or sardi(na) rather than sarda(na) -is by definition a phonemic one, the importance for listeners lies not in deciding what phonemes they have heard, but in deciding between words. The minimal elements that can be matched to memory representations are those that are stored in the lexicon; incoming speech information is processed with respect to the information it gives about these representations.