14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Acoustic-Phonetic Cues to Word Boundary Location: Evidence from Word Spotting

Nicolas Dumay (1), Alain Content (1,2), Uli H. Frauenfelder (2)

(1) Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale - Université Libre de Bruxelles - Belgium
(2) Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Expérimentale - Université de Genève - Switzerland

This research examined acoustic-phonetic cues to word boundary location in French consonant clusters, and assessed their use in on-line lexical segmentation. Two word-spotting experiments manipulated the alignment between word targets and syllable boundaries. A perceptual cost of such misalignment was observed for obstruent-liquid clusters but not for /s/ + obstruent clusters. For the former clusters, the analysis of a corpus of utterances showed systematic variations in segment durations as a function of the lexical assignment of the pivotal consonant. We conclude that the availability of acousticphonetic cues to word boundary location in consonant clusters depends upon the cluster class. When available, these cues are exploited in on-line lexical segmentation of speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dumay, Nicolas / Content, Alain / Frauenfelder, Uli H. (1999): "Acoustic-phonetic cues to word boundary location: evidence from word spotting", In ICPhS-14, 281-284.