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SPOKEN WORD ACCESS PROCESSES (SWAP)
May 29-31, 2000
Nijmegen, The Netherlands |
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Occam's Razor is a double-edged sword: Reduced interaction is not necessarily
reduced power
Doug Whalen
Haskins Laboratories, New Haven
Although Norris, McQueen and Cutler have provided convincing evidence that
there is no need for contributions from the lexicon to phonetic processing,
their simplification of the communication between levels comes at a cost
to the processes themselves. While their arrangement may ultimately prove
correct, its validity is not due to a successful application of Occam's
Razor. The kind of statistical accumulation that they propose also presupposes
that there are units of a particular size that are the sites for those
accumulations. The units could be segments, but the perceptual effects
of units of other sizes would perhaps lead to the expectation that frequencies
could accumulate at any of those levels. The evidence from the lexical
access literature is lacking on this point, since the evidence for accumulation
at the segmental level is quite recent. But we would expect listeners to
be sensitive to the statistical properties of any unit that they used perceptually.
These considerations can also be contrasted with the evidence that listeners
parse the signal into the various phonetic units in a fairly complete way,
without strict left-to-right processing. If the results of that parsing
are the units at which the statistical properties accumulate, then the
parsing must be complete before the statistical likelihoods can have an
effect, or the statistical likelihoods are part of the parsing itself.
The first possibility seems to require yet another level between speech
perception and lexical access; the second possibility requires a far more
complex version of speech perception than we are typically used to. At
this point, it is only possible to make preliminary suggestions for a resolution.
Full Paper
Bibliographic reference.
Whalen, Doug H. (2000):
"Occam's Razor is a double-edged sword: Reduced interaction is not necessarily
reduced power",
In SWAP-2000, 147-150.