Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non- adjacent syllables to segment ‘‘words’’ from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to or- ganize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alterna- tively, language may limit what representations are open to statistical investigation according to their specific lin- guistic role. In this article, we focus on vowels and con- sonants in continuous speech. We hypothesized that vowels and consonants in words carry different kinds of infor- mation, the latter being more tied to word identification and the former to grammar. We thus predicted that in a word identification task involving continuous speech, learners would track TPs among consonants, but not among vowels. Our results show a preferential role for consonants in word identification.

Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: the role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing

Bonatti LL
;
2005-01-01

Abstract

Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non- adjacent syllables to segment ‘‘words’’ from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to or- ganize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alterna- tively, language may limit what representations are open to statistical investigation according to their specific lin- guistic role. In this article, we focus on vowels and con- sonants in continuous speech. We hypothesized that vowels and consonants in words carry different kinds of infor- mation, the latter being more tied to word identification and the former to grammar. We thus predicted that in a word identification task involving continuous speech, learners would track TPs among consonants, but not among vowels. Our results show a preferential role for consonants in word identification.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3715144
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