Segmenting liaison-initial words: The role of predictive dependencies

Abstract

Listeners use several cues to segment speech into words. However, it is unclear how these cues work together. This study examines the relative weight of distributional and (natural) acoustic–phonetic cues in French listeners' recognition of temporarily ambiguous vowel-initial words in liaison contexts (e.g., parfai t [t]abri “perfect shelter”) and corresponding consonant-initial words (e.g., parfait tableau “perfect painting”). Participants completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective–noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (more frequent as word-initial consonant and thus expected advantage for consonant-initial words), /z/ (more frequent as liaison consonant and thus expected advantage for liaison-initial words), or /n/ (roughly as frequent as word-initial and liaison consonants and thus no expected advantage). The results for /t/ and /z/ were as expected, but those for /n/ showed an advantage for consonant-initial words over liaison-initial ones. These results are consistent with speech segmentation theories in which distributional information supersedes acoustic–phonetic information, but they also suggest a privileged status for consonant-initial words when the input does not strongly favour liaison-initial words.