Department of English Education, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea.
Department of Cognitive Science, University of Malta, Msida, Malta.
PLoS One. 2018 Aug 27;13(8):e0202912. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0202912. eCollection 2018.
Application of a phonological rule is often conditioned by prosodic structure, which may create a potential perceptual ambiguity, calling for phonological inferencing. Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine how spoken word recognition may be modulated by the interaction between the prosodically-conditioned rule application and phonological inferencing. The rule examined was post-obstruent tensing (POT) in Korean, which changes a lax consonant into a tense after an obstruent only within a prosodic domain of Accentual Phrase (AP). Results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that, upon hearing a derived tense form, listeners indeed recovered its underlying (lax) form. The phonological inferencing effect, however, was observed only in the absence of its tense competitor which was acoustically matched with the auditory input. In Experiment 3, a prosodic cue to an AP boundary (which blocks POT) was created before the target using an F0 cue alone (i.e., without any temporal cues), and the phonological inferencing effect disappeared. This supports the view that phonological inferencing is modulated by listeners' online computation of prosodic structure (rather than through a low-level temporal normalization). Further analyses of the time course of eye movement suggested that the prosodic modulation effect occurred relatively later in the lexical processing. This implies that speech processing involves segmental processing in conjunction with prosodic structural analysis, and calls for further research on how prosodic information is processed along with segmental information in language-specific vs. universally applicable ways.
语音规则的应用通常受到韵律结构的制约，这可能会产生潜在的感知歧义，需要进行语音推断。本研究通过三个眼动实验，考察了韵律条件下的规则应用与语音推断之间的相互作用如何影响口语识别。所考察的规则是韩语中的后塞音紧张度变化（POT），即在重读音节短语（Accentual Phrase，AP）内，一个清辅音在遇到塞音后会变成紧辅音。实验 1 和 2 的结果表明，在听到派生的紧辅音形式后，听者确实会恢复其潜在的（松）形式。然而，只有在不存在与听觉输入声学匹配的紧辅音竞争时，才能观察到语音推断效应。在实验 3 中，在目标词之前仅使用 F0 线索（而没有任何时间线索）创建了一个 AP 边界的韵律线索（阻止 POT），语音推断效应消失了。这支持了语音推断是由听者在线计算韵律结构（而不是通过低级别的时间归一化）来调节的观点。对眼动时间进程的进一步分析表明，韵律调制效应在词汇处理中出现得相对较晚。这意味着语音处理涉及与韵律结构分析相结合的分段处理，需要进一步研究韵律信息如何以语言特有的和普遍适用的方式与分段信息一起处理。
