The redundancy of phonemes in sentential context

Printed English is highly redundant as demonstrated by readers' facility at guessing which letter comes next in text. However, such findings have been generalized to perception of connected speech without any direct assessment of phonemic redundancy. Here, participants guessed which phoneme or printed character came next throughout each of four unrelated sentences. Phonemes displayed significantly lower redundancy than letters, and possible contributing factors (task difficulty, experience, context) are discussed. Of three models tested, phonemic guessing was best approximated by word-initial and transitional probabilities between phonemes. Implications for information-theoretic accounts of speech perception are considered.