The role of segmental and durational cues in the processing of reduced words.
Marco van de Ven, Mirjam Ernestus
PMID 28870139WHAT IT FOUND
Dutch listeners with no reported hearing loss understood reduced words in spontaneous speech better when they heard consonants that followed a missing first vowel.
Giving them the word's duration instead made recognition worse.
Key findings
01Listeners identified reduced target words correctly on 26.02% of trials from context alone and on 43.19% of trials when they also heard the initial consonant cluster.
02Hearing consonants after an absent unstressed vowel improved recognition more than simply hearing a longer stretch of speech.
03When the gap was made to match the reduced word's duration, listeners performed worse than when the gap duration was fixed.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The participants were Dutch native speakers with no reported hearing loss, so the study says nothing about patients with hearing loss, language impairment, or other languages. It used laboratory gating with a square-wave gap replacing part of the speech, which the authors say lowers ecological validity. Each experiment used 20 participants, and each participant heard only some gates, so the findings may not generalize broadly. No clinical population, assessment, or therapy was tested.
Declared interests
The research was funded by a European Young Investigator Award from the European Science Foundation, an ERC starting grant, and a Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research vici grant awarded to Mirjam Ernestus.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that word duration helps patients understand reduced speech. In the study, duration information made recognition worse, and the participants were Dutch native speakers with no reported hearing loss, not patients.