TY - GEN
T1 - Vocabulary structure and spoken-word recognition : evidence from French reveals the source of embedding asymmetry
AU - Cutler, Anne
AU - Bruggeman, Laurence
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has far-reaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffixing or to effects of stress (in particular, final syllables containing the vowel schwa). Analyses of the standard French vocabulary here reveal an effect of suffixing, as predicted by this account, and further analyses of an artificial variety of French reveal that extensive final schwa has an independent and additive effect in promoting the embedding asymmetry.
AB - Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has far-reaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffixing or to effects of stress (in particular, final syllables containing the vowel schwa). Analyses of the standard French vocabulary here reveal an effect of suffixing, as predicted by this account, and further analyses of an artificial variety of French reveal that extensive final schwa has an independent and additive effect in promoting the embedding asymmetry.
UR - http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/533235
UR - https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/archive_papers/interspeech_2013/i13_2812.pdf
M3 - Conference Paper
SP - 2812
EP - 2816
BT - Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2013), 25-29 August 2013, Lyon, France
PB - International Speech Communication Association
T2 - International Speech Communication Association. Conference
Y2 - 25 August 2013
ER -