Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

Prosodic knowledge affects the recognition of newly acquired words.

Shatzman KB, McQueen JM

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. keren.shatzman@let.uu.nl

An eye-tracking study examined the involvement of prosodic knowledge--specifically, the knowledge that monosyllabic words tend to have longer durations than the first syllables of polysyllabic words--in the recognition of newly learned words. Participants learned new spoken words (by associating them to novel shapes): bisyllables and onset-embedded monosyllabic competitors (e.g., baptoe and bap). In the learning phase, the duration of the ambiguous sequence (e.g., bap) was held constant. In the test phase, its duration was longer than, shorter than, or equal to its learning-phase duration. Listeners' fixations indicated that short syllables tended to be interpreted as the first syllables of the bisyllables, whereas long syllables generated more monosyllabic-word interpretations. Recognition of newly acquired words is influenced by prior prosodic knowledge and is therefore not determined solely on the basis of stored episodes of those words.

Published 10 May 2006 in Psychol Sci, 17(5): 372-7.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Linguistics Research Today. All Rights Reserved.