Effects of probabilistic phonotactics on the recognition of words in continuous speech

No invariant or highly probable cue to the borders of words exists in continuous speech. Thus recognizing individual words in speech is not a trivial task. The current study investigates the role of probabilistic phonotactics as a possible source of word border information. Specifically, the trough hypothesis is tested. According to the trough hypothesis, biphones spanning the borders of words should provide cues to those borders if the intraword co‐occurrence probability of the biphones is near zero. Lexical decision and word spotting experiments provide evidence for the trough hypothesis only for the beginnings of words. [This research was supported (in part) by research Grant No. 1 R01 DC 0265801‐A1 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.]