Title: The effects of syllable boundary and context on word recognition in Korean continuous speech

Authors: Jinwon Kang; Kichun Nam

Addresses: Department of Psychology, Korea University, Anam Campus, Anam-dong 5-ga, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, South Korea ' Department of Psychology, Korea University, Anam Campus, Anam-dong 5-ga, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, South Korea

Abstract: We examined resyllabification cost in spoken word recognition in Korean and found an interaction between syllable boundary and context at the lexical level. Experiment 1 compared a misalignment condition and an alignment condition. The misalignment condition involves the word-final consonant merging with the onset of the next syllable. The alignment condition involves word-vowel match with syllable boundary. Experiment 1, in the word spotting task, showed faster and more accurate word recognition in the alignment than in the misalignment condition. Experiment 2 was conducted to investigate the effects of the syllable boundary as well as context on word recognition. Four types of target stimuli were created: target related-aligned, target related-misaligned, target neutral-aligned, and target neutral-misaligned. Experiment 2, auditory lexical decision task, showed an interaction between syllable boundary and context variables. Thus, we confirmed the syllable's role as a segmentation unit. Furthermore, the context and the syllable boundary significantly affected word recognition at the lexical level together.

Keywords: syllable boundary; resyllabification cost; Korean speech; word recognition; speech recognition; syllable context; continuous speech.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2014.063257

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2014 Vol.8 No.2, pp.162 - 173

Received: 13 Aug 2013
Accepted: 06 Dec 2013
Published online: 26 Jul 2014 *

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