DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010 The 5th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech The 2nd International Symposium on Linguistic Patterns in Spontaneous Speech Tokyo, Japan, September 25-26, 2010

Phonological Competition in Casual Speech

Anne Cutler (1,2), Holger Mitterer (1), Susanne Brouwer (1), Annelie Tuinman (1)

(1) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500 AH, The Netherlands
(2) MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, NSW 1797, Australia

The natural processes affecting spontaneous speech production and the natural processes of spoken-word recognition combine to cause significant activation of irrelevant lexical competitors. Using eye-tracking, we show that reduced forms of words that occur in casual speech cause listeners to activate lexical candidates that resemble the reduced form but are quite unlike the canonical form of the intended word. In L2, the problem is worse: casual speech processes that occur in the L2 but not in the L1 lead to activation of irrelevant competitors even where native listeners experience no such competition.

Index Terms. word recognition, competition, eyetracking

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cutler, Anne / Mitterer, Holger / Brouwer, Susanne / Tuinman, Annelie (2010): "Phonological competition in casual speech", In DiSS-LPSS-2010, 43-46.