Coarticulation and the Structure of the Lexicon by Rebecca Anne Scarborough

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Models of word recognition differ with respect to their position on the course of recognition over time. , Marslen-Wilson and Welsh, 1978; Warren and Marslen-Wilson, 1987). If this is correct, and especially if adjustments in degree of coarticulation that are mediated by lexical factors are aimed (consciously or not) at facilitating lexical perception, we might suppose that anticipatory and carryover coarticulation would be differently affected by lexical factors. Anticipatory coarticulation might show a greater lexical effect, as this type of coarticulation would result in earlier and potentially predictive cues to a segment.

In fact, one can imagine a number of coarticulatory factors that might have perceptual consequences for a lexical effect on coarticulation. Certain coarticulatory cues 47 have more salient perceptual consequences than others. Furthermore, some provide more useful acoustic information, perhaps leading these types of coarticulation to be increased more in hard words than other types. On the other hand, it might be that certain types of coarticulation actually mask important acoustic cues (in ways that listeners are unable to unravel, at least efficiently), actually hurting more than helping.

Summary of Corpus VN nasal-contrastive V non-contrastive V NV nasal-contrastive V non-contrastive V TOTAL 32 32 32 32 128 Table 5 Summary of the French corpus, showing the total number of words of each type. Each type contains an equal number of high-R and low-R words. 2. Subjects Eight subjects participated in the data collection experiment. All were native speakers of French from France; 3 were female and 5 were male. Although the length of their time in the United States varied widely (from 2 weeks to more than 10 years), all 42 had at least completed high school in France before leaving.