Word recognition involves subconsciously weighing several overlapping word candidates before deciding.
Evidence
Lexical competition is the process through which listeners consider all the mental representations that overlap with the heard signal as candidates for the word intended by the speaker. Before making a lexical decision listeners thus subconsciously consider multiple words, including homonyms (e.g., ‘pair’ and ‘pear’) and lexical embeddings (e.g., paint in paint ing). In optimal conditions, lexical competition is resolved (i.e. phonologically similar words are disambiguated) very early in the course of speech perception because listeners can rely on a plethora of acoustic cues that mark the difference between phonologically overlapping words (e.g., Salverda et al. 2003 ), and further also benefit from semantic information in sentences (Dahan and Tanenhaus 2004 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3953
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines lexical competition and the default model of on-line speech recognition.
- XREF: Connects to TRACE and Shortlist connectionist models of speech perception cited here.