TRACKING PERCEPTION OF PRONUNCIATION VARIATION BY TRACKING LOOKS TO PRINTED WORDS: THE CASE OF WORD-FINAL /t/

Holger Mitterer & James M. McQueen
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

ID 1026
[full paper]

We investigated perception of words with reduced word-final /t/ using an adapted eye-tracking paradigm. Dutch listeners followed spoken instructions to click on printed words which were accompanied on a computer screen by simple shapes (e.g., a circle). Targets were either above or next to their shapes, and the shapes uniquely identified the targets when the spoken forms were ambiguous between words with or without final /t/ (e.g., bult, bump, vs. bul, diploma). Analysis of listeners’ eye-movements revealed, in contrast to earlier results, that listeners use following segmental context when compensating for /t/-reduction. Reflecting that /t/-reduction is more likely to occur before bilabials, listeners were more likely to look at the /t/-final words if the next word’s first segment was bilabial. This result supports models of speech perception in which prelexical phonological processes use segmental context to modulate word recognition.