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Understanding Compressed Sentences: The Role of Rhythm and Meaning a
Author(s) -
MEHLER JACQUES,
SEBASTIAN NURIA,
ALTMANN GERRY,
DUPOUX EMMANUEL,
CHRISTOPHE ANNE,
PALLIER CHRISTOPHE
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1993.tb22975.x
Subject(s) - boulevard , annals , meaning (existential) , art history , library science , humanities , art , computer science , philosophy , engineering , classics , epistemology , civil engineering
The language user can recognize words uttered by different speakers, even when they vary their intonation and speaking rate. In this paper we focus on the user’s ability to recognize word forms regardless of whether they are spoken fast or slow. Indeed, speech rate is highly variable in natural context. For example, a word uttered in isolation may be twice as long as the same word uttered in the middle of a sentence. However, regardless of the mode in which a word is pronounced, the two resulting acoustic signals activate the same lexical representation. That people have this ability suggests that speech must be coded in a time-invariant fashion. Psychologists are quite familiar with the study of perceptual invariance for the visual When it comes to speech, however, the study of perceptual invariance, in particular that of time, has generated less interest, and we are thus still unable to explain how the acoustic/phonetic processors solve this problem. Cognitive scientists who work in the area of speech recognition generally assume that subjects use their lexical knowledge to normalize the signal. Undeniably, lexical processing does intervene at some level, but we believe that normalization of the signal is a necessary part of prelexical processing, that is, it has to take place prior to the intervention of lexical lookup routines.