The possible-word constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech. Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. Cognit Psychol, 34(3):191-243, 1997.
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We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which could not be a word–for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detect apple, for example, in fapple (where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than in vuffapple (where vuff could be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.
@Article{Norris1997,
  author   = {D. Norris and James M. McQueen and A. Cutler and S. Butterfield},
  journal  = {Cognit Psychol},
  title    = {The possible-word constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech.},
  year     = {1997},
  number   = {3},
  pages    = {191-243},
  volume   = {34},
  abstract = {We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to
	constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language.
	This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate
	words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input
	which could not be a word--for instance, a single consonant. In two
	word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detect
	apple, for example, in fapple (where [f] alone would be an impossible
	word), than in vuffapple (where vuff could be a word of English).
	We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based
	model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process
	of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech
	between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is
	not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced.
	This implementation accurately simulates both the present results
	and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.},
  doi      = {10.1006/cogp.1997.0671},
  keywords = {Analysis of Variance, Humans, Phonetics, Psycholinguistics, Speech Perception, 9466831},
}

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