Context Effects in Spoken Word Recognition of English and German by Native and Non-native Listeners
Robert Albert FeltyAbstract
Spoken word recognition involves integrating acoustic/auditory information extracted from the signal with linguistic knowledge, including sentential and discourse context, as well as the frequency of the words in the signal, and the similarity of target words to other words in the mental lexicon. Recent research on visual word recognition has shown that morphology may also affect lexical access, and that the effects of morphology on lexical access may be language-specific. This study investigates the effect of morphology on spoken word recognition using two languages which share many phonological characteristics but differ in key aspects of morphological structure.
Four separate experiments investigated open-set spoken word recognition in noise using English and German disyllabic words and nonwords, testing both native and non-native listeners of each language. Results from native listeners showed facilitatory effects of lexical status and lexical frequency, as well as inhibitory effects of neighborhood density, consistent with previous studies using English CVC stimuli. In addition, the results showed a processing advantage for monomorphemic words over bimorphemic words, indicating that morphology also has an influence on spoken word recognition. The processing advantage of monomorphemes was greater for native listeners of German than of English, which is taken as evidence that the morphological structure of the language plays a key role in the influence of morphology on spoken word recognition. Results from non-native listener experiments were largely consistent with the native listener results, suggesting that non-native listeners are sensitive to the same context effects as native listeners, although the size of the context effects were generally somewhat smaller for non-native listeners, suggesting that the amount of exposure to a language can also affect processing.
No current models of spoken word recognition can account for all of the effects found in this study. Full storage models cannot account for effects of morphology, while morphological decomposition models cannot account for neighborhood density effects. Therefore, a revised version of the Neighborhood Activation Model (Luce & Pisoni, 1998) of spoken word recognition is proposed which posits that words are stored whole in the lexicon, and that in addition to orthographic, phonological, semantic, and frequency information, lexical entries also contain morphological information.