An investigation of a lexical segmentation strategy for Afrikaans

A series of short, spoken Afrikaans phrases was presented to 15 native speakers of Afrikaans at a volume level at which they were unable to make out clearly what was being said. Subjects were asked to write down what they believed they had heard. Errors in the identification of boundaries between wo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:SA journal of linguistics = SA tydskrif vir taalkunde Vol. 17; no. 4; pp. 325 - 341
Main Authors: Leibbrandt, Richard, Bokhorst, Frank
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: 01.11.1999
Subjects:
Afrikaans
Error Analysis
Juncture
Lexical Access
Speech Perception
Stress
Word Recognition
ISSN:1011-8063
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:A series of short, spoken Afrikaans phrases was presented to 15 native speakers of Afrikaans at a volume level at which they were unable to make out clearly what was being said. Subjects were asked to write down what they believed they had heard. Errors in the identification of boundaries between words were analyzed to determine whether subjects made use of a strategy previously shown by other researchers to be employed in the segmentation of spoken English into individual words. The prediction of that strategy, namely that subjects would be inclined erroneously to insert word boundaries before strong syllables (containing full vowels), & to delete existing word boundaries before weak syllables (containing reduced vowels), was not supported. Instead, significantly more segmentation errors (both deletions & insertions) were made before strong than before weak syllables. We suggest that these results may be better reconciled with a model of word recognition similar to that proposed by F. Grosjean & J. P. Gee (1987), according to which (1) stressed & unstressed syllables are identified by separate search processes & (2) a lexical search is centered around a unit consisting of one stressed syllable & any adjacent unmatched unstressed syllables, with rival hypotheses competing in parallel for recognition. 1 Appendix, 21 References. Adapted from the source document
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ISSN:1011-8063
DOI:10.1080/10118063.1999.9724546