Part of
Above and Beyond the Segments: Experimental linguistics and phoneticsEdited by Johanneke Caspers, Yiya Chen, Willemijn Heeren, Jos Pacilly, Niels O. Schiller and Ellen van Zanten
[Not in series 189] 2014
► pp. 261–274
This paper reports a syllable monitoring experiment that examines the role of segmental phonetic information in Dutch. Participants were presented with lists of spoken words and were required to detect auditorily specified targets that matched or did not match the initial syllable of the spoken target-bearing carrier word. The often-reported effect of syllabic match – the so-called syllable match effect – was not observed in this experiment. Instead, our results revealed that listeners make use of fine-grained acoustic information during syllable monitoring: Reaction times to CVC-targets were found to be predictable by the duration of the pre-consonantal vowel in case the extent of VC-coarticulation was small (i.e. for stops).