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

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. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.