On the distinction between prosodic and semantic factors in word identification

Two factors contributing to the identification of a word are the prosody of the sentence in which the word occurs and the semantic relation between the word and its context sentence. To investigate further these two factors, we created a series of target words that ranged from “bath” to “path” by systematically varying word‐initial voice‐onset‐time, placed these words in a number of different sentence frames, and asked listeners to identify each word as “bath” or “path.” Both the speaking rate of the sentence and the semantic congruity between the target word and the sentence affected the way in which acoustically ambiguous words were identified. However, the effects were quite different in nature. Whereas a change in speaking rate influenced word identification even when the listener was not required by task demands to attend to the context sentence, a change in semantic congruity altered identification only when attention to the context sentence was required. This suggests that in the course of identifying a word the processing system automatically takes into account the prosodic structure of the utterance, but not its semantic content. The implication of these findings for models of word recognition will be discussed.