Effects of the match between listener expectancies and coarticulatory cues on the perception of speech

Several experiments have attempted to establish the order in which various linguistic units (e.g., syllables and words) are processed. This article presents an alternative interpretation (the target-stimulus mismatch interpretation) for those earlier results. This interpretation states that the closer the match between the listener's expectancies about how the stimulus will sound (the target) and the sound of the acoustic stimulus the listener actually hears (the stimulus), the faster the listener will recognize the stimulus. This interpretation was tested in an experiment in which the match between the target and the stimulus was varied by manipulating the acoustic (coarticulatory) properties of the stimulus while the size of the target (syllable) was held constant. The results suggest that earlier findings explained in terms of linguistic units or levels can be explained more readily by the target-stimulus mismatch interpretation, and these results provide evidence that coarticulatory information is utilized by the perceiver of speech.