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Title: | The mental lexicon is fully specified : evidence from eye-tracking |
Authors: | Mitterer, Holger |
Keywords: | Eye tracking Visual perception Speech perception Psycholinguistics -- Case studies |
Issue Date: | 2011 |
Publisher: | American Psychological Association |
Citation: | Mitterer, H. (2011). The mental lexicon is fully specified: evidence from eye-tracking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37(2), 496-513. |
Abstract: | Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input ("pin") activates lexical entries with underspecified coronal stops ('tin'), but lexical entries with specified labial stops ('pin') are not activated by mismatching input ("tin"). The eye-tracking data failed to show such a pattern. Although words that were phonologically similar to the spoken target attracted more looks than unrelated distractors, this effect was symmetric in Experiment 1 with minimal pairs ("tin"- "pin") and in Experiments 2 and 3 with words with an onset overlap ("peacock" - "teacake"). Experiment 4 revealed that /t/-initial words were looked at more frequently if the spoken input mismatched only in terms of place than if it mismatched in place and voice, contrary to the assumption that /t/ is unspecified for place and voice. These results show that speech perception uses signal-driven information to the fullest, as predicted by an optimal perception account. |
URI: | https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar//handle/123456789/25396 |
Appears in Collections: | Scholarly Works - FacMKSCS |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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The mental lexicon is fully specified_evidence from eye-tracking.pdf | 439.86 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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