298 • CHAPTER 11 Language
We will consider how context affects meaning in a moment, but
fi rst let’s focus on perception—our ability to sense words and parts of
words as individual units. For example, perceiving the spoken word bug
in the two sentences above would involve hearing the sounds that make
up that word as separate from the sounds of the other words in the
sentence, and also sensing what the word sounds like. We don’t have to
know the meaning of the word bug to perceive it, although, as we will
see, sometimes knowing the meaning can help us perceive it. We begin
our discussion of perception by considering how we hear phonemes.Speech: Perceiving Phonemes The powerful effect of context on
perception is illustrated by the demonstration that a phoneme that is
part of a sentence can be heard even if the sound of the phoneme is
covered up by an extraneous noise. Richard Warren (1970) demon-
strated this by having participants listen to a recording of the sentence
“The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in
the capital city.” Warren replaced the fi rst /s/ in “legislatures” with the
sound of a cough and asked his participants to indicate where in the
sentence the cough occurred (● Figure 11.1). No participant identifi ed
the correct position of the cough, and, even more signifi cantly, none
of them noticed that the /s/ in “legislatures” was missing. This effect,
which Warren called the phonemic restoration effect, was experienced
even by students and staff in the psychology department who knew that
the /s/ was missing. This “fi lling in” of the missing phoneme based on
the context produced by the sentence and the portion of the word that
was presented is an example of top-down processing.
Warren also showed that the phonemic restoration effect can be infl uenced by the
meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme. For example, the last word of
the phrase “There was time to *ave.. .” (where the * indicates the presence of a cough or
some other sound) could be shave, save, wave, or rave, but participants heard the word
wave when the remainder of the sentence had to do with saying good-bye to a departing
friend. This example of how our knowledge of the meanings of words and the likely
meanings of sentences affects speech perception is another example of top-down pro-
cessing. The effect of knowledge on speech perception has also been demonstrated by
fi nding that more restoration occurs for a real word like prOgress (where the capital
letter indicates the masked phoneme) than for a similar “pseudoword” like crOgress
(Samuel, 1990). We will now consider how our knowledge of the meanings of words
helps us to perceive them.Speech: Perceiving Words One of the challenges posed by the problem of perceiv-
ing words is that not everyone says words in the same way. People talk with differ-
ent accents and at different speeds, and most important, people often take a relaxed
approach to pronouncing words when they are speaking naturally. For example, if you
were talking to a friend, how would you say “Did you go to class today?” Would you
say “Did you” or “Dijoo”? You have your own ways of producing various words and
phonemes, and other people have theirs. For example, analysis of how people actu-
ally speak has determined that there are 50 different ways to pronounce the word the
(Waldrop, 1988).
The way people pronounce words in conversational speech makes about half of the
words unintelligible when taken out of context and presented alone. Irwin Pollack and
J. M. Pickett (1964) demonstrated this by recording the conversations of participants
who sat in a room, waiting for the experiment to begin. When the participants were
then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own conversations,
they could identify only half the words, even though they were listening to their own
voices! The fact that the people in this experiment were able to identify words as they
were talking to each other, but couldn’t identify the same words when the words were
isolated, illustrates that their ability to perceive words in conversations is aided by the
context provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation.●FIGURE 11.1 Phonemic restoration eff ect. In the
sound stimulus presented to the listener, the sound
of the s in legislatures is masked by a cough sound.
What the person hears is indicated below. Although
the person hears the cough, he also hears the s....met with their
respective legislatures......met with their
respective legislatures...“cough”Cough soundCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.