![]() Second, most of the interest and research effort in speech perception was directed toward feature and phoneme perception. First, the bulk of work on word recognition was concerned with investigating visual word recognition processes with little, if any, attention directed to questions of spoken word recognition. For many years these two lines of research, speech perception and word recognition, have remained more-or-less distinct from each other. Word Recognition and Lexical Representation in SpeechĪlthough the problems of word recognition and the nature of lexical representations have been long-standing concerns of cognitive psychologists, these problems have not generally been studied by investigators working in the mainstream of speech perception research (see ). ![]() In our view, it is important to direct research efforts in speech perception toward somewhat broader issues that use meaningful stimuli in tasks requiring the use of several sources of linguistic knowledge by the listener. To say, as some investigators have, that speech perception is a “special” process requiring specialized mechanisms for perceptual analysis is, in our view, only to define one of several general problems in the field of speech perception and not to provide a principled explanatory account of any observed phenomena. We believe that continued experimental and theoretical work is needed in speech perception in order to develop new models and theories that can capture significant aspects of the process of speech sound perception and spoken language understanding. Several general operating principles have guided the choice of problems we have decided to study. However, relative to the bulk of speech perception research on isolated phoneme perception, very little is currently known about how the early sensory-based acoustic-phonetic information is used by the human speech processing system in word recognition, sentence perception or comprehension of fluent connected speech. Researchers in any field of scientific investigation typically work on tractable problems and issues that can be studied with existing methodologies and paradigms. This research strategy has undoubtedly been pursued because of the difficulties encountered when one deals with the complex issues surrounding the role of early sensory input in word recognition and spoken language understanding and its interface with higher levels of linguistic analysis. Research on speech perception over the last thirty years has been concerned principally, if not exclusively, with feature and phoneme perception in isolated CV or CVC nonsense syllables. Our interest has been with the interface between the acoustic-phonetic input - the physical correlates of speech - on the one hand, and more abstract levels of linguistic analysis that are used to comprehend the message. Much of the research conducted in our laboratory over the last few years has been concerned, in one way or another, with the relation between early sensory input and the perception of meaningful linguistic stimuli such as words and sentences. Taken together, the results of these projects demonstrate a number of new and important findings about the relation between speech perception and auditory word recognition, two areas of research that have traditionally been approached from quite different perspectives in the past. The theory is based on findings from human listeners and was designed to incorporate some of the detailed acoustic-phonetic and phonotactic knowledge that human listeners have about the internal structure of words and the organization of words in the lexicon, and how, they use this knowledge in word recognition. Finally, the third project describes efforts at developing a new theory of word recognition known as Phonetic Refinement Theory. Differences in identification were shown to be related to structural factors about the specific words and the distribution of similar words in their neighborhoods. ![]() Statistics about similarity spaces for high and low frequency words were applied to previously published data on the intelligibility of words presented in noise. The second project describes the results of analyses of the structure and distribution of words in the lexicon using a large lexical database. Using a priming paradigm, evidence was obtained for acoustic-phonetic activation in word recognition in three experiments. The first project was designed to experimentally test several specific predictions derived from MACS, a simulation model of the Cohort Theory of word recognition. This paper reports the results of three projects concerned with auditory word recognition and the structure of the lexicon.
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